I am very happy I can finally show this to the Goldsource mapping community. For the past 8 months (since May 2017) I was working on a C++ project I am calling "PlanShape", which is a generator (or whatever you would call it) for circular bodies (cylinder, arch, tori and sphere) that also completely texturizes the objects during the process.
The basic principle for the mesh generation is inspired by this tutorial. For those who don't know it yet, you start with a PI circle made of 12 vertices, rotate it by 15 degree and then snap it to a larger grid. The resulting circle is some kind of mathmatical miracle, because objects you can create of it will have planar faces, which is a major advantage of course (no triangles & clean coordinates at best). The circle can also be divided into higher resolutions, without loosing these advantages.
There are some downsides, too, of course, the biggest one being floating point coordinates.
While 12 is the minimum resolution, it can be theoretically doubled endlessly, but the higher it goes, the higher the chance for floating point coordinates will be. Hammer can't import those, not even with vluzacns floating point patch installed. You can minimize this effect by using low resolutions and/or large radiuses for the objects.
If you can't avoid having FPCs in the object, the program will enlarge it automatically until the coordinate becomes integer. E.G.: 64.75 * 2 = 129.5 * 2 = 259. The scale factor for Hammer would then be added to the map file and can be seen in the maps properties menu, so you can regain its original size again.
Modern editors like Sledge and JACK should be able to load FPCs without these issues, but stince I still prefer Hammer over everything, this was an important feature to me.
No GUI! One more downside is, that there's no GUI yet, and probably never will be, so the process is not very practical, but still very helpful for huge high res objects, that also need to be textured.
Not Circular! The resulting object will also not be completely circular in terms of PI. This isn't a problem, unless you're planning to let it rotate very fast. Otherwise nobody can tell the difference.
Long story short, I've created a site for the tool and added a few download mirrors and a documentation.
Latest version download mirrors: Potential Future Updates:
- Hollow Sphere
- the missing texture region
- optimized brush structure
- RMF export
I would be really thankful for any feedback and bug reports! The last can be send to my email adress (totac@web.de), including the correspondent files and a desciption of the problem.
I look forward to your feedback. Let me know what you think of it and if it helped you in one of your projects!
