rocks and caves Created 21 years ago2003-04-24 17:01:03 UTC by Grapez

Does anyone know how you can make caves and rocks easily? Is there some trick for it? I tried to make a cave from starting with a simple block and using vertex manipulation, but that doesn't work well, because I don't know how to put in an extra vertex.
I mean, when I try to manipulate a block into a cave im still stuck with 8 vertices (because a block only has 8 vertices) but a cave requires a lot more of them.
(this might be a good idea for a tutorial, too)

Two really easy ways of manipulating areas are Nemisis and Gensurf19. Both programs allow you to do cliff faces and irregular surfaces.
As for the cave idea, There is a rock model in HL, called rockgibs.mdl. If that isn't what your looking for then you will have to keep going with VM. Try using several blocks on top of each other to get the shape you want, either way, HL was made for flat surfaces, and in short, there is no easy way...
Anyone else know different?

Yeah, trying to make natural-looking scenery and stuff is about as hard as it gets. There are a few popular methods but they're all usually the same thing in essence: make a grid of blocks, then manipulate them as simply as possible. The thing is, VM only works to a certain point with ONE solid. But you can do anything if you create lots of little solids that you VM separately.

I suggest you simply break up the place you want to put the cave into several cubes (use carve to slice a big block up into a grid - make your carve selection, then click the button again and again until its all white - that way you cut the thing up but don't lose any bits).

Then delete the cube that you want to be the actual hole, and manipulate the blocks around the gap. Here's a drawing:

----------------------------------
|            --------            |
|            |_|__|_|            |
|            | |**| |            |
|            |?|??|?|            |
|            --------            |
----------------------------------

Delete the cube with the asterisks in it, and then grab the corners of the cubes around that one, and pull them around to round off the hole. It'll look more natural if you use different sizes of cube.

Rocks... again, use more than one block, and manipulate them as simply as possible.

A tut... yeah, it would make a good one Sometime...