Triangle displacment help

[Ninjilla]

Is there a safe way to make a triangular displacement? I have one made, kept the 4th vertex separate, and it made the displacement but gave me the errors:

brush 40515: floatplane: bad normal side 3 texture: nature/blendrockgroundwallforest

and I think

make_triangles:calc_triangle_representation: cannot convert

With 3 vertices it plain kills the displacement but even with the 4th vertex there it crashes the map. What can I do?

 

[Artesia]

no you can't make a triangle displacement, if you use the vertex tool to move one vert over another, and say no to combining them, it will give you an error even if you don't make a displacement from it.

what I did, for something similar, is left it a square, with one half of it below the ground unseen... I try to keep displacements square if possible, without distorting them.

its the same number of points if you leave half underground, the main difference is the points will be evenly spaced rather than all bunched up like you have there

 

[fubarFX]

as far as i know, there is no real way to fix this, delete the bad mofo and redo it

 

[Nineaxis]

Yeah, you might all well just have half of it underground, considering A) it doesn't effect vis B) it won't leak and C) the texture won't get screwed up as it comes to the end.

 

[Ninjilla]

Oh snap, I didnt think about leaving half in the ground. But I still cant quite get it to work, I stuck the square half way in the ground, and Ive tried various things, aligning the top two vertices to the match the hill its gonna be the wall for, leaving it as is, I can usually get the sides to sew but not the bottom, unless the brush is the same height as the floor brush, which would make it a triangle. because the right vertex needs to match as well. Should I just un-displace everything and start over?

 

[TracerDX]

Maybe something like this?

+----+
|      \
|         \
+------------+

But yea, displacements MUST have 4 sides. This is why Hammer destroys them when you change that. Trying to get around that is going to cause issues. This will probably not change due to the nature of displacements.

You could just cover the hole with a huge rock. I ran into the same issue on one of my maps.

 

[Artesia]

Oh snap, I didnt think about leaving half in the ground. But I still cant quite get it to work, I stuck the square half way in the ground, and Ive tried various things, aligning the top two vertices to the match the hill its gonna be the wall for, leaving it as is, I can usually get the sides to sew but not the bottom, unless the brush is the same height as the floor brush, which would make it a triangle. because the right vertex needs to match as well. Should I just un-displace everything and start over?

If I read this right, you're sewing the walls to the floor? there's no need to do that, they can stick through each other without problems.

 

[Ninjilla]

Guess I am gonna have to put a rock prop over the bottom seam, it wont seem to close otherwise, visually. But ever since I tried the half square in displacement thing, my hammer has been fussing up visually, this happen to anyone else?

Notice how the walls have some weird repeating grey and green textures, Ive never used those ever, and they go on every surface in my map. Plus my floor is shown as a stone/grass blend when its dirt/gress. It changes depending on the angle I look at my displacements. Hammer is lame :[

 

[Artesia]

your texture is set to blendrockground, maybe you accidentally assigned it to things, I sometimes do that accidentally if I have the face edit sheet set to apply rather than lift select. when you open it it then applies the texture to everything you had selected. as for sewing the displacements together, it would help to see the base brushes. What I've been doing for my displacements, is make 3 visgroups named Base Displace, Unsculpt Displace, and Displaced. I leave copies of each stage in their visgroup, so if I need to go back I can easily. I just keep the unneeded 2 hidden.

 

[Ninjilla]

Well the thing is, it flickers between rock and dirt, and like I said, every other texture flickers between metal,wood, dev, whatever to the green and grey tiled textures. Its only when Im moving around or at a certain angle though, its weird. I will get a pic of the base brushes in a sec.

Heres that:

and another example of my weird flickering texture problem.

It happens even when I copy the map into a new file, dunno why. It started when I tried to add that new triangle piece, and now it wont go away.

EDIT 2: I clicked a rock model, and its even texturing part of the box with some SUPER small grey texture

 

[Artesia]

is it possible you made a copy of everthing, 2 of everything inside the same space, all with a new texture?

 

[Ninjilla]

Okay, I deleted about 1/3 of my brushes in a big delete key spree, none were doubles. The Textures still flashed across empty space. It doesnt happen I copy individual parts of the map to a new file, but the whole map is a different story, starts freaking out. Maybe I will need to just copy piece by peice x_X. Thankfully I saved 2 versions of my file, one was a mirror test before displacements, if I could just delete the other half and then re-arrange my ground and hills and redisplace, that may work.

 

[brick]

Its very hard to see from your screens of what you are talking about. Well you could use cordon to see which part is bad. Also are you using vertex tool on a displacement?

 

[Ninjilla]

Yea, I need it to fit into a triangular shape so my downhill brush can have a wall. I have tried to make many shapes to fit it with 4 sides, but one side is always off so the displacements dont match up and therefore sew correctly.

EDIT: Okay, I think this version of the map is just messed up. I undisplaced everything, and its saying I have a displacement that's less than 4 sides. I turned off all visgroups but displacements and nothing. I compile the mirror test and it says nothing of displacement errors. Bleh.

 

[Ninjilla]

I got my flickering stuff fixed (hidden displacement not viewable in the 3D view), so now I just need to get my cliffside working. One step at a time :]

 

[Open Blade]

I don't think I've ever heard of anybody trying to sew walls to the ground. Just let the walls go through the ground displacement.

I always try to keep my displacement simple, a single sided 512x512 shape and I can build anything from that, tunnels, small walls, big walls, corners, ceilings, and they always sew right up. I've seen some guys angle their walls but I just keep it all square and then paint the geometry rounded. The key is make sure the area covered is large enough, that way it keeps the wall smother and not just moving single points around.

Thy only time I don't use is 512x512 is the main ground if it's a large area.

 

[Ninjilla]

Hmm, well what I eventually did was just raise the hill up to make a ledge, which I will smooth out to make the bottom of the ramp. Simple solutions never come naturally to me it seems lol. After some rearrangement, all my displacements are working fine. Thanks everyone!