New with Hammer and Map Making

[RavenStryker]

Hi, This is obviously my first post, I've been here many many many times reading tutorials and help posts that have been put up here to help me with my maps. I've only been mapping for about 2-3 weeks now and I love it. I'm very creative and love to design stuff so this is perfect for me.

But I've ran into some problems with my creations(well making them anyways). I'm having some trouble figuring out how to work some of the tools in the Hammer Editor. Like I was looking through some of the threads and noticed with this building

(like what I wanna do) it has a lot of curves and stuff. I can't seem to find a tool to round off squared edges and stuff. Or how he made the window so it looked like that instead of being completely oval or arched looking. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if I am just not understanding it.



I know that there are different Brush Types to work with like the ones below:

But none that really help with stuff like that.



Another thing I saw on a map was something like this. There wasn't a picture of it so I had to make a quick BASIC photoshop of what it looked like.

That is what it looked like, it was a walkway along the wall that was about person width but had that like "curving" ramp in it to make it raise up just a bit.(Looked to be about 16-32 in height) I've tried and tried and tried with displacements to recreate it but I just can't get anything that looks that smooth.



The final thing I'm having trouble with is when carving certain pieces every now and then I'll get this ∞ brush that just shows up out of no where and just goes till the end of the level. I've been dealing with that by just cropping it off but it is quite annoying and was wondering what might exactly be causing that.





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Any help with any of these subjects would be greatly appreciated and would most definitely let me put more of my ideas to work. I know that there are people on here to that can cause I've seen some great tutorials and people here know their $h!t. Lol. I tried searching the forums for most of these but didn't really come back with anything that was conclusive to these problems in particular. Thanks to anyone who is able to fill in these gaps for me.
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[Armadillo of Doom]

Quite an introduction, lol Welcome to the group m8. First thing, the carve tool is very situational. If used improperly, it will chop up your map like sushi and give weird errors like what you described. Most of the time you should use the cut (clipping) tool instead, second from the bottom. That said, for the rounded edges, a simple cylinder will do the trick. Place it where you want the wall to curve, then line up the square brushes (walls) on either side. If you look at the main gate in that picture, you can see the square brush above the metal, with half a cylinder on either side.

As for the windows, that's a little trickier. This is my preferred method, but a lot of people like to use vertex manipulation. (I suggest you grab a snack). Take that arch window as an example. Start by creating a block that is considerably bigger than your window, so you have room to work with. Now create an arch the same size as the window for a reference. Make sure the arch's wall width is sufficiently thin. Also, if you look at that picture, you can see where the window curves. You don't want the arch to have too many sides. At most 12. So now you have a block and very thin arch.

This is where the cutting tool becomes essential. Line up your two brushes right next to each other. Now select the block, and use the cut tool to start creating your arch inside the block, w/ the arch brush as a reference. It's not going to line up perfectly, and that's fine. Drop the grid to 4 units and get as close as you can. Remove the excess pieces from inside the block, and you should have something very close to that window. Now it will fit perfectly into any square wall. Convert the whole mess into func_detail, and you're done.

You can apply the same method for the cylinder window. The black metal border is done w/ the texture app. tool. Apply a texture to just one side of the brush. Hope this helps. Also, thank you for the compliments This community is indeed quite awesome. If you ever have any quick questions, there's usually someone in Steam chat you can ask.

 

[RavenStryker]

Steam chat?hmy:

 

[RavenStryker]

Steam chat?hmy:

How exactly do you make brush's into func_detail I thought you could only do that with entity?:bored:


Thanks for clearing up just about all of those questions. my thanks has been added. ;-)
Now if we could get one more person in here to try and answer my rolling floor deal that would be perfect. You'll def. be seeing more of me around here and hopefully depending on how everything goes, this map that I am making so you can download it and have fun. I'm not one for posting step-by-step construction cause it takes more time than is needed, so if I do put it up it'll be only at major checkpoints on the map.

 

[Dox]

All done with vertex manipulation, click http://forums.tf2maps.net/downloads.php?do=file&id=587 so you can download it, open it up in hammer, and see it all.

 

[RavenStryker]

And one more thing about vertex editing, is there any way to delete the different vertex that I don't need to to simplify the object?

 

[Dox]

Yes, all you need to do is drag the vertex you don't need onto an adjoining one and it will allow you to merge them into 1 vertex. to create more vertices, all you need to do is select two of the yellow face vertices and hit Ctrl+F to split that face.