Diagonals - Newbie Question Created 19 years ago2004-08-10 18:54:21 UTC by andrewspy007

Hi. I just finished the beginner's tutorial and I'm making a few simple maps before I move on to intermediate ones. I suddenly realized that I have no idea how to make anything go diagonally (ex. a walkway). Any help would be great.

diagonally? hmm... do you mean a floor?

Sort of. In one of my practice maps, I have a # of large boxes. I want to connect two boxes directly together at random. I want to use a walkway to connect them. I'm using Hammer 3.5 and everything seems to be based on squares (eg. the grid). So I don't know how to make my walkway go diagonally between the two boxes.

I would use vertex manipulation to angle a walkway up. screw around with it. You can get about any shape you would want..

You can do this a few ways. The first uses a wedge primitive. Select wedge from the list and create a block as you would do any other shape. It may take some rotation to be correctly aligned to your floor or whatever.

The next option is the shear tool. Select an object and click it twice until there is one selection box on each face. Drag the boxes in any direction to shear the object at an angle. You can use the clip tool afterwards to clean up the brush.

The third option is Vertex Manip, which involves selecting the object in VM mode and moving the vertices to the desired angle. I'd suggest that you leave this option alone until you get a bit more experience, or read the VM tuts we have here to get an idea of how to accomplish this.

yeah... what he said!

thanks, I try that out

You can also use Ctrl-T to rotate things at angles, such as to make crates look better than just being in even stacks, or to place barrels at angles.

Yes, Hammer uses a grid system but this doesnt mean you are limited to squares! You can accomplish pretty much anything in Hammer, provided its within engine limits.

Ignore my first post, I just realized it talks about making things like ramps and not things like walkways at angles between crates .

Vertex Manipulation is probably the best, as it ensures that all the points stay on the gridlines. If you've got stuff not on the grid (when the grid is set to size one {use the '[' and ']' keys to resize it}) then you're more likely to end up with tiny leaks. Look up 'leak' in our glossary if you don't understand.

We've got two V.M. tutorials too. Check 'em out if you haven't already.

For things like Crates and detailing and such, I rarely bother to make sure they snap to grid. If it's an element of the architecture, then yes, make sure it snaps to grid.

um for a walkway, in the 2d side (or front) click the brush creation button and click where u want to start to be and hold it down to the end point (drag to right) while making it atleast 1 squar thingy thick.

is that wat u mean?

Personally, I cant stand anything not snapping correctly to grid when I rotate it, so vertex manipulation is the way to go IMO

rotated crates are better than vertexed crates at angles, simply because rotated is more square than you're going to get with VM.

nice mini-tutorial on ramps there 7 =P