✔️ Download example map
Glass is a pretty fundamental part of first-person shooters these days. It's taken for granted most of the time, but it adds greatly to the general realism. And it's fun to shoot, too.
Breakable glass and weapons... a match made in heaven!
Making glass
There's nothing particularly special about Half-Life's glass, apart from its unique bullet marks. If you create a slab of glass in Hammer (i.e. any brush with one of the 'glass' textures covering it), it will just look like any other object. Only when it's an entity can it be translucent and breakable, and it's not difficult to set up.
First you need your brush. Click
Browse on the texture panel in Hammer, and type 'glass' into the filter box. A group of glass textures should appear. I used
glass_med
for my example map. Double-click the texture you want, and create a simple cube somewhere.
Making it breakable
Once you've created your brush, right-click it and select
Tie to Entity. Choose
func_breakable
from the entity list that pops up. Obviously if you'd prefer indestructible glass you'll have to use something different - try
func_wall
. If you are using the
func_breakable
, set
Gibs Direction to
Relative to Attack (looks a bit cooler this way).
Material Type should be
Glass, and everything else can stay as it is. Simple!
Making it transparent
You will find that almost all of the brush-based entities you can create in Hammer have these basic properties:
- Render FX
- Render Mode
- FX Amount
- FX Color
To make your glass translucent, open your new brush's property sheet (right-click it), set
Render Mode to
Texture, and type some numerical value between
1 and
255 in
FX Amount.
255 is fully opaque, and
1 is transparent. A value of about
100 generally works for glass, but you can experiment and choose something that suits you.
That's about all there is to it. Fire up the example map, pick up one of the weapons, and blow away some windows!