Creating or Cutting Walls Created 17 years ago2007-04-04 08:40:12 UTC by Johnnsen

Hi, i dont know if im makin it right: Now, i do it like this: If i want a room, i take for walls, with textures, and then i try to adjust it with the other walls, so it looks good. The same thing for a window. I take a glas, then i make for pieces around it, so theres a wall, you know?

Is it possible to do that easier? Maybe with some kind of autofit, or through cutting out holes of the wall to place a window there?

Because, now its really hard to make it look good, because it wont fit right, and it takes me million trys to adjust the walls to each other.

I hope you understand the problem, im kinda not well rested, and plus: Im german. Pls help here guys.

Doing it your way is actually the best way of doing it, surprisingly. Hammer has a carve feature, whereby you can stick a brush into another brush to punch a hole through it, but it can screw up quite easily if you don't know what you're doing.

I highly suggest you keep doing it the way you've been doing it. As for the 'not fitting right' part, I'm not entirely sure what you mean...

Where do I use this brush? I hate it to make a window out of sixty parts -.-.

The wall thingy: I mean that the one part of the wall comes through.. I mean..It doesnt exactly fit. Like this: http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/1025/wallmt3.jpg

Like Ant said making a window out of sixty parts is the 'best' way to do it. It can take time but the end result pays off. Who said making the Universe would take a day

If you don't know a brush is basically a solid shape that you created. People use that saying a lot.

Ant was just saying you can put a 'brush' through a wall and then select it and click tools, carve. This cuts a hole through the wall but it is bad practice and shouldn't be used really especially on rounded shapes which leave tiny cracks which looks bad and makes the level lag that tiny bit more.

Hope you understood that.

Thx for the answers. My next question is: How to get the walls fit to each other? I showed you the picture, and thats my problem. I pull the wall over here, i push it over there, but after all this its often the same: It looks wrong because it has ugly edges like on the picture. Pls help me with this one.

To get walls to fit each other...Well you either resize them or move them so they are aligned. If they can't then your gridlines may be too big?

Try pressing [ and then dragging the wall so it aligns.

You should build most your base architecture on the grid size of 16. This makes it easier for things to fit together well.

Yeah. Build the basics first, then detail everything later on.

DO NOT

I repeat...

DOOOO NOOOOTTT

Ever!

EVER EVER EVER!!

Use the Carve or Hollow tools. Anything you can do with them you can do with VM... better and with less risk.

This goes for Clip too... I still see no purpose for it.

ALso!

Use wedges for everything. If you really want to use a box, thats fine, but never use the cylinder, or those other pesky pointless tools.

Good Luck.

Well, Tetsu0, that isn't actually the best way to go for me, but some people do it like that.

wow! like 3 seconds apart dude!

Brattylord, that is horrible advice, I have to say. Never use the clip tool? Are you insane? Its like, the second most useful tool in Hammer! What are you on?!?!

You also said not to use cylinders, which is bullshit. How else do you suppose you'll get rounded shapes if you never use the cylinder or clip tool? Your advice on wedges is flat out ridiculous, too. Are you just trying to make this mapper's life hard?

And last but definitely not least, those other "pesky tools" are hardly pesky. For instance, how do you think you can get a perfectly shaped rounded wall piece without using the arch tool? It may be possible, but it would take ages, and there is absolutely no reason not to use it.

Maybe I'm just to noobish... but I use clip, carve, hollow etc all the time. Only thing I do is only carve square objects, and try to line them up to ensure the least amount of brushes created.

There is nothing wrong with those tools if you use only blocks with them.
And clip can be sometime ever better then vertex manuplation, just type 'o' when your mouse pointer is the on the 2d screen to make sure there are no subgrid verticals.
In fact clipping might save you sometimes and errors, like melformed face normal, face with no normal or the pesky coplanar plane error. You might get confused with VM and forget to merge a verticel, or just miss a vertical, while in clipping all the merging is done for you already.

Just prove to you these tools are used by skilled mappers I'll give you two examples- rimrook and myself!(I know it's a bit snug of myself but I've mapped for 2 years and I believe that by now I've learned quite a bit about hammer)
Rimrook uses hollow and carve all the time because it saves time, and I can bet he uses clip too. Those tools can save alot of time, which is important to a mapper.
I use clip, even though I hate those off grid verticals and check all the time if there are non, I'm just very careful.

About the hollow and carve, it's not they are not good I have my own reasons why I don't use them. It's harder to control the carve tool, if you have a bit complicated archtitecture it could carve stuff the block didn't even touch, you just don't need to carve more complicated stuff then a block, a wedge, or any other simple primitive, so it doesn't meet my requirements. The hollow doesn't meet them too, since I hardly have cubic rooms, and starting a room from a cube might strain on my imagination. Might be that I could think of better ideas if I didn't start from a cube.

Those are the reasons I don't use either the tools, but both are fine! Also I'm not regular to use them, I've used clip, tranletion, tranformation and vertex manupilation up till now and it will take me some time to use other tools.

You also said not to use cylinders, which is bullshit.

Cylinders have the tendency to place a vertex off of the grid, being off of the 1 by 1 grid.

There are ways to get around not using those tools and still save time. I was writing a tutorial on advanced architectural techniques, though it never got finished... Captain P and I were writing one on the basics of why NEVER to use these tools, but... we never finished it...

These tools are shortcuts, and anything you can do with them you can do better with simple vertex manipulation.

To me, using the arch tool is just like using the soda machine prefab; it is not unique to the map, and its been done before. Arches need to have a certain feel in a room, and simple making a perfect one (that happens to be all one brush) can produce errors and is not desirable.

Cylinders have the tendency to place a vertex off of the grid, being off of the 1 by 1 grid.

Bullshit! If you use cylinders in sizes of 8 and 16, everything will be on grid. 12 sided are problematic, but their verticels can always be snaped manually. Just to prove it, try to create a cylinder in the size of 4 units? Looks more like a square doesn't it? Well thats because hammer can't find the on grid points to place the a few vertex on them.

It is not like using a soda prefab, it is still unique since it's not something very difficult to create yourself, and that anybody will notice if it was done by you or by hammer, besides hammer places the vertex so it will create a perfectly round arch while it is likely that you will misplace some verticels. Besides it's a waste of time to create manually each arch, also it has the same mechanisem that prevents off grid verticels, try to creat a 3 sided arch in the size of 4 units. Again it is rather squarish. Don't say things unless you have an absolute proof, I have one.

I have all respect for you and captain P, he gives me many good advices, but this time this is utter nonsense. Saving time is also very important, if I were to make each arch or cylinder in my map ocean temple I would have never finished it!

My online problem for now is that the fuckin walls wont fit. I move it to the left > wont fit. I move it the same value to the right > wont fit. Its fuckin horrible. I dont use hollow to make my rooms, i use 4 walls, a floor and a ceiling, but it often it wont fit. I tried it for ages also with the smalles grid size which makes it often even harder..

To me, using the arch tool is just like using the soda machine prefab; it is not unique to the map, and its been done before. Arches need to have a certain feel in a room, and simple making a perfect one (that happens to be all one brush) can produce errors and is not desirable.

While I do think this thread should get back on topic and stop harping on BrattyLord, that was just too ridiculous a statement for words, for all the reasons mentioned above.

@Johnnsen: With that wall from that pic, you could move/resize it like everyone else said. Or you could try to vm it but I think that'll make it angular.

@BrattyLord:

Cylinders have the tendency to place a vertex off of the grid, being off of the 1 by 1 grid.

Um just vm each side until its on the grid, simple...

Saying anything is useless is total bullshit as is saying that they cause to many errors. Basicly all the errors you get are caused by the mapper miss useing the tool and those that arn't can be fixed by hammer for you when you check for problems with VERY few exceptions.

@Johnnsen
Looks like your useing a very small grid size. Try changeing it to 16 (8 or 32 will also do but I prefew 16) useing the "[" and "]" keys. When you go to make a brush the box you drag on the screen should also snap to your current grid setting makeing it easy to line things up.

I don't see your point, BL. Sure, if you're looking for something special and need some really custom stuff - make your arches brush-by-brush, though I can't see why you couldn't use the arch tool, if you just need a plain simple arch.

Clipping tool - bad? Well other than the 1/1000 chance of it generating a leak (only happened once to me) - it's absolutely safe to use.

Hollowing - bad? I use it quite a lot and I've never had any problems with it. Sure, you can go all leet by making every simple hallway brush-by-brush, though I can't be arsed to do that. You can easily manipulate every wall of the hollowed object later on, so there's absolutely no reason to flame it.'/

All of these tools make mapping much easier for everyone, not to mention the newcommers, so I don't see, why you should be telling a starting mapper not to use them.. :/

He doesn't want another mapper to surpass him

I don't understand what you mean about the walls not fitting? Your picture doesn't help me. Post more pics?