Help with tank prefab brushwork Created 3 years ago2021-01-09 02:33:17 UTC by Cabo Fiambre

I'm currently making recreations of most of Half-Life's prefabs and i was working with the vehicles when i stumbled across my worst nightmare: THE TANK MODEL. To be honest most of Half-Life's geometry is pretty messed up but i'm trying to fix that. The thing is that i'm having trouble making the "turret" area of the tank (i recreated a lot of prefabs but this has to be the most complicated to recreate since the geometry is pretty weird and i can't get good results without getting invalid solids) so i'm recurring to the most advanced and professional mappers out there to aid me with this issue. I'm gonna leave the file with the prefab in it so you can check it out.

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It looks like you've only been using the clipping tool so far? I don't think you can avoid vertex manipulation if you want to create a properly slanted M1 Abrams turret. The main rules for brushes are that they must be convex, and that all of their faces must be perfectly flat ('planar').

The M1 turret is a convex shape already, so that shouldn't be a problem, but it can still be useful to split it into multiple brushes (front/center/back), so each part can be manipulated separately.

Keeping faces flat is always tricky with slopes like this, but sticking to 'simple' slopes (1:2, 1:4, etc.) and coarser grid sizes can help reduce the chance that slope edges will meet at an off-the-grid point (this may cause non-planar faces). If that doesn't help, you can always use triangular faces. Either by starting with triangular brushes, or by splitting non-triangular faces by creating edges between vertices (this can be done by selecting them in vertex manipulation mode and pressing Ctrl+F).

How could I forget... there's also shear mode. Create a brush for one side of the front of the turret, then use shearing to move one of the sides and the top backwards. Then use the clipping tool to cut off the back of the brush and to make the side of the turret slanted. Then copy this brush to the other side and flip it, and you should end up with a reasonable turret front.

And just as with vertex manipulation, it's better to stick to slope ratios like 1:2 and 1:4 and to use coarser grid sizes.

Done! I used shear to make that part and it went pretty well. After all this is something that is intended to be used as an entity so there shouldn't be any problems. Thanks for the tips and explaination!