How to make a pillar based on displacements?

[Przemek]

I remember a website with HL2 tutorials, it had an orange background, if I recall correctly. There was a tutorial I am desperately searching for, with no luck. So I decided to ask here.

I want to make a pillar with displacements, the tutorial I am speaking of showed a method involving subdivision, making the pillars nicely round. I want to achieve this:



Thanks in advance!

 

[Crispy]

1. Make a square pillar brush.
2. from the top-down view, clip the pillar into 4 quarters
3. Imagining that all these 4 smaller brushes will combine to make your final pillar, go into the texture application tool and select all the faces on the outside of the 'pillar', except the top and bottom faces (you should end up with 8 faces selected; 2 for each 'quarter' brush)
4. On the texture application tool, go to the 'displacement' tab
5. Here is the subdivision tool. (it's a while since I used it but you should be able to figure it out by trial and error from here)

6. By subdividing the selected faces (I recommend a factor of 3), the two outer edges of each of those 'quarters' will now have merged into a smooth curve, giving you a perfectly rounded pillar. Also, since they were all selected when you did the subdivision, all of the 'quarter' brushes will have merged together to make one pillar.
7. Don't forget to put solid BSP geometry (i.e. normal brushwork, no brush-based entities or displacements) above and below the pillar or you will have holes in your level and the compile will come back with errors.

 

[Unarmed]

Seems like a rather expenisve pillar instead of just using cyldinders.... But I can see it would make sense if you'd want to bend the pillar later on.

 

[Przemek]

A cylinder brush doesn't work too good - duplicate plane errors. It might be because it's to narrow or some nearby geometry it too complex, don't know yet. It almost killed my map, because the compiling tools have gone mad (vbsp did not generate a bsp file without an error message) and Hammer started shouting about errors in map file Good thing I make copies occasionaly

So I don't really know why the cylinder brushes aren't welcome by the compiling tools in my map, but the displacements work OK - there is a slight issue with lighting, but I can live with that

 

[Release]

Just curious when you tried the cylinder brush based pillar did you try turning it into a func_detail? I would kind of agree I think a pillar made from displacements is a little expensive for something that might not have to be

 

[Crispy]

I don't think this should be that expensive at all if you're doing it right. Don't make the factor too high and it should be fine.

 

[Shinobi]

make a prop, it'll work out much much better

 

[Crispy]

Okay I found the tutorial for this one since it seems you're still having problems. Credits go to DJBourgeoisie of Neotokyo (and of these forums, so you can PM him with thanks if you like) for the tut and Corporal_Fortier from the Natural Selection community for the download link.

Download link: http://www.louisfortier.ca/upload/displacement_tut.7z

Download link seems to be working at this time.