Recommend me how to make a map (house) Created 9 years ago2015-04-20 15:24:28 UTC by JORGETECH

Hi, I decided to start on counter strike mapping and I wanted to make a house (similar to cs_militia but for defuse). Can anyone write some guidelines so it looks realistic?

Hi! Welcome to TWHL
The first thing you want to do is draw something on paper. Draw a floor plan with room names and doors and hallways.
Then you need to look at each room individually.

What's in the living room - Couch, chairs, tables, lamps, television, possibly an entertainment center, pictures on the walls, windows, curtains..

What's in the kitchen? - Sink, counters, drawers / cabinets, appliances (stove, microwave, refrigerator). Is there a bathroom? Is there a basement? Is there a bedroom? If you treat each room in the house as it's own little world, the details pretty much fill themselves in.

Aside from it being realistic, that really depends on the object scale and the texture quality. Feel free to post some development screenshots and we'll all be happy to comment and give some constructive criticism.

P.S. A lot of people like to use imgur.com as a host. It's easy and free!

Thanks, I'll edxperiment with the heigth comparing with the size of the player. I will try to make the map only with cs 1.6 textures.

EDIT: How do you post images?

For more "realistic" environments, you should try out mapping for CS:GO. Either way, before starting on the layout of the actual map, reference photos are the best way to go.

Take a look at the tuts, if you haven't already: http://twhl.info/tutorial.php

Mapping a place you know always turns out more realistically too, even if it's from a TV show or movie; drawing ideas & inspiration from things you are familiar with is a good thing.

Be prepared to make multiple revisions to your work. No matter how good your initial mapping is you can always make it better! and hence more realistic

If you are mapping cs 1.6, be sure to use the latest VHLT tools for the most realistic-looking lighting

Are you new to mapping? Follow along all the basic tutorials on this site. Play with making things that will go into the house e.g. func_door_rotating, glass (func_breakable or func_wall(non breakable glass)) etc. etc. The more you know, the more you have at your disposal. Just decide what you're trying to make and then figure out how to do it and if doing it in goldsource is possible. I personally prefer goldsource to source because source overheats my lappy...

Goldsource is good for starting, it keeps things simple.

Which Counter-Strike do you want to map for? 1.6, Source, Global Offensive?

If you're going for a 'realistic' look, goldsource won't have the fancy shaders needed for physically accurate lighting, but the good news is that it has (for it's time especially) an excellent radiosity engine that will yield very realistic results, even if watered down by low resolution and compression.

However, if you want to make the most out of the radiosity engine, as with any physically based rendering, you need to think physically.
Where are the lights, what are their properties, how will they interact with the scene. Ask these types of "physical questions" first, then place your lights. The lighting engine will take care of the rest.

To post images, use image tags inside square brackets. [] and [/]
So

[img]image address here[/img]

Thanks for replying. First of all I'm going to make the map for cs 1.6, I don't have Global Offenssive. I downloaded Half-Life SDK from Steam icluding Hammer 3.4, but I noted that doesn't have vehicle's prefabs and the counter strike .fgd doesn't include entities, any answer to that?

You'll probably have to download a custom prefab library and fgd file.

Ok so Hammer doesn't come with vehicle prefabs, you'll have to make your own. There are tutorials floating around - which we can help you with later - but for now you need to properly setup hammer to work with Counter-Strike 1.6.

You'll need the proper FGD which stands for Forge.. game something.... idk but an FGD is a list of all the entities that interact with the game code.

Basically without it, counterstrike wouldn't know that you wanted something to be a door, or a bombsite, or a trigger etc etc..

you can grab one of them here: http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/cs-fgd-xp_8u.zip

Notice that I said "One" because there are many different FGDs out there, but that's a popular FGD. (another is ZAZA's FGD which I can't find right now)

Anyway, once you have the proper FGD, slap it into your steam\steamapps\common\counter-strike folder, and then follow this tutorial: http://twhl.info/tutorial.php?id=47 to help you along with setting up hammer.

Use the search field up to to find some answers. It's a bit vague at times, but it usually points you in the proper direction.
Or post here - good luck