Phantom Brush Created 17 years ago2006-06-25 06:39:15 UTC by srry

I'm having some rather strange problems that I've never encountered before or even heard of happening to anybody. To put it simply, there's this big unwanted block sticking out the side of an unfinished building in my map.

In Hammer:In-game:The funny thing is, the texture that's on that big ugly block wasn't even used in my map (although it shows up in my used textures for some reason).

Keep in mind there's quite a bit more to the map than you can see in the pictures, including some quite complex vertex-manipulated terrain, and the map is all skyboxed in at the moment. Would these have anything to do with it?

Help me out, I'm quite stumped here.

EDIT: Err, by the way, I might not be able to respond to this for a while, I'm going to be gone a day or two.

if its in your used textures list it must be on something.
try replacing all instances of that texture with something else and see if the block changes texture too.
else try the old copy all and paste into a new rmf...

oh, and use jpegs next time. that in-game screen is about 10 times as big as a jpeg would be.

I already tried marking it and replacing it, but it just says "0 textures replaced" or "0 textures marked". It still shows up as a used texture, and it still has the same texture in-game.

I'm about to leave on a trip, so I'll try copying it all into a new RMF when I get back.

And sorry about the PNG, I had no idea it was one. It was really late at night when I was converting the pictures, so I guess I just confused it with JPG (it won't be the first time).

I had a problem like this where a cylinder would appear in the middle of a coridoor. I fixed it my drawing a selection box around the ara where it should be, and that selected it. However, this may not solve you problem. You are sure it simply isnt hidden, try clicking on the "Show all hidden brush" tab to make sure - but i doubt thats the problem...

I appolagise if this wasnt any help, i have a habit of occasionally sending in incompetend assistance (though never to here before)

Did you ever use that texture in the past at all? it could be that you had an "invalid shape" error with a crush that used that texture and when you fixed it it threw thr brush outside of the world. When something like that happens, weird things like that can occur.

Could be an odd-behaving entity, could be an old version of the map (compile problem, no new .bsp is written), could be something entirely different...

Perhaps submitting the .rmf or .map file to the problem map vault would help, so some of us could take a look?

a, thanks so much! You're right, it was just hidden, but there's no way I would have ever looked there before, because I never use Visgroups. I've never had any need for them before, so I just didn't bother to learn how to use them.

Some things are learned the hard way...

Not that this was too hard, but hey...

Damn I was gunna say that!

Do you use the IG button? The "hide selected items" button is right next to it. Sometimes when your working to fast, you hit the wrong button

You don't really need visgroups if you working with a simple map, but they become irreplaceable if you map is big, or you have tons of entities invloved.

The more stuff you visgroup or hide, the smoother Hammer renders stuff for you as well--makes it much easier to view big/busy maps in Hammer, because the camera movement is smoother, less-erratic.