Making custom buildings? Are there any tricks?

[Pennington]

Do you seriously have to build them outta a bunch of tiny boxes? i mean, if you could drag them around in the actual 3d view window that'd be a lot easier. But making abuilding out of a couple hundred small 'board' boxes takes a long ass time when you have to use three seperate windows to align them.

Is there any way to just cut shapes outta stuff? Cut or trim or whatever it's called seems to only cut two or three diff sections. When i tried to use it (and it was time consuming anyway) and used three cut lines it still wouldn't cut out the actual section of the door, it kept flip flopping between one side of one line or another.

Is there no way for me to just go and slice the shape i need to outta a hollow box?

 

[gokumike]

I know you can carve stuff, i could try to explain but it would be hard to . go to help then help topics user guide on the thing, then go to the reshaping solids part. hope this helps.

 

[Argyll]

Don't carve.

Yes, you have to make the architecture with brushes, but you can have details as models (like arches, window frames, etc.).

Welcome to BSP mapping. This takes a lot more creativity, patience, and skill than just morphing terrain and sticking a few static models on there and calling it a map.

 

[Gergor]

It would be a lot easier and less taxing in-game to make just the basic structure of the building in Hammer, and use models for the details. If you don't know how to model, it would be a good skill to learn. But yeah, the whole aligning in three separate windows is just a reality of working in a 3d environment. It is time consuming. It sucks. Oh well.

 

[JoeMan05]

Another way to make it a little faster, depending on what kind of map you are making, is to construct just the building you want in a new map. Then press edit>select all and turn it into a prefab. That way on your actual map you can just put your entire building you built, wherever you want.

 

[Viperidae]

Also, look around the HL2 maps, and see what texture combos they use. Surprisingly, a lot of the buildings were very undetailed and blocky, but the texture usage was superb, so at a glance they look detailed.

 

[Pennington]

Why shouldn't i use carve?

And thanks. For what i'm doing it's easier to do it in hammer. The building is not really a building so much as an inner face of another room, and i need it in there to line stuff up, check how it looks visually, etc.

I've got another unrelated question. Can u use doors thru thin textures? Like for the center of my level i have a clearing in the columns that make it up and a little overseeing type of room there. The windows are simply metal grating (wanted something you could shoot thru, didn't want glass) but i wanted armour plates that you could slide over them. I meade some steel doors, but they didn't work thru the metal grating. Is there any way to make them do this (like you couldn't operate them from inside cuz the grating was in the way, and not from outside cuz gordon can't fly)

 

[Shinobi]

dont quite understand your second question but there are a lot of reasons not to carve,, one is that by doing that you have a really high chance of having a brush with a face that can "see" another face which is quite bad,, it just lets you have all these nasty errors

 

[DEATH eVADER]

If you want to add more textures onto one face of the wall, its also helpful to click on the clipping tool three times.

Select a wall (or room if you want to save time and polygons are not a problem). Slice though the selected wall/room holding down the mouse whilst in clipping mode. A white line should appear in the window you are using. Pressing Enter will cause the wall to split into two seperate brushes