[Turtorial] Arches
Aug 4, 2011 20:03:40 GMT
Post by Zeph on Aug 4, 2011 20:03:40 GMT
1) First of all, find the size of the door you want to fill with an arch.
My door here is 128x128x16. That's 16 units thick.
2) Use the create brush tool, select the "Arch" primitive.
Hammer always makes arches in the TOP view, so draw your your door in the TOP view.
Pick a good number of sides. For this kind of arch you want it to be twice the number of segments you want, as you'll only be using half the arch. I've picked 16, as circled in red.
Make the door larger on all four sides by a wall thickness (It's arbitrary what value you use, but make sure you do this!). In my case, i'm going to use 16. 8 would do, even 4 would do. Don't make it much larger than this.
3) When you try to create the object, this window appears.
Make sure the Wall Thickness is the same as used above. In my case, this is 16 units (or 8, or 4...).
The best trick is to always make a 360 degree (full circle) arch. It makes life much easier, as hammer will stretch what ever arch section you choose to fill the brush area. Keep it simple, keep it a full circle, and keep it square.
4) Your arch should be created in the TOP view.
Once made, try VERY hard no to re-size it / scale it. Hammer has made this arch so that it's points lie nicely on grid coordinates. Stretching the arch will throw the points off-grid, and make it messy.
Make it to size in the first place and avoid scaling it.
Rotate your arch (and maybe make it thinner, if necessary) to fit the doorway.
5) Use the vertex edit tool, and drag out the white corners of each brush to form a nice square outer edge. Pick the edge points closest to the points original location. See the blue circles.
The top two corners have been done to show you a finished result. You can skip the bottom two corners for an arch way in a door, else we'll be deleting that side soon!
6) Next, use the CLIP tool, and clip off the edges you don't need. This is where the bottom gets cut away. Remember, white=keep, red=delete. Click the CLIP tool multiple times to change which side is kept/removed.
(Note: You may un-group the arch (ctrl+u) and delete the arch segments you don't need instead. Clipping is just a bit faster)
7) Keep clipping until you remove the additional wall thickness's as well. It should only take 4 clips.
8) You should be left with your arch!
9) Since this is a complex shape, and is not 'simple and square' like the original empty doorway was, it's very important to make this a Func_Detail. This makes the compiler ignore this complex shape when splitting the 'inside' into volumes. See the Optimisation Guide for more details.
10) You should now have an archway for your doorway! Woo!
11) Texture the archway.
The best way to texture is to make all the brushes to have the NoDraw texture on all sides. Then paint each visible side individually as needed.
