Want to start mapping, Advice needed.

[GinandJuice]

I am a Half-Life addict, ive been playing HL since I was 10. I beat hl2, and personally loved the game. Ive tried messing around in hammer, and gotten nowhere. I figured this would be a really good place to go to get information, and for people to help me with beggining mapping. I have always wanted to become a part in the HL/HL2 community, not just a player. I have a few questions, and I thank you for helping me out.

Is it very difficult to learn how to use hammer? Is there a steep learning curve?

Do you know of any websites that have FAQ's for beggining mapping?

What is a brush? What does it do? How does the player interact with it? What are entities?

Do you have any advice for a beggining mapper?

I know, many of you will find this cheesy, and "newbish", but I would like to try mapping out. Ive always loved to design things like level concepts in CAD, or draw them, and I really just want to take it one step further, I thank you for any advice, and your time.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Hammer has a lovely interface. It's almost cuddly. The learning curve for using Hammer is very shallow. The curve for making good maps is a lot steeper

http://collective.valve-erc.com has every bit of information about mapping that you could ever wish for.

A brush is your basic building block for a map. Brushes make up your basic geometry - walls, floors, ceilings etc. Entities are basically anything that does something. Lights, moving objects, models are all entities. Just to make things a bit more confusing, some entities can be made of brushes.

Open Hammer. Play around with it. Follow some tutorials.

 

[Merc248]

Some websites that helped me greatly:

http://www.thewavelength.net
http://www.snarkpit.com
http://collective.valve-erc.com
http://www.mapcore.net (awesome level design community with a bunch of people that are professionals in the gaming industry)

There is one more site that I would've linked except that the forum blocked the URL. Anyway, it's an extremely good resource for tutorials and such. If you want, you can PM me for the link.

Now, on to answer your questions. I'm a newbie mapper myself, but I've gotten myself through learning Hammer and various mapping techniques I think.

1.) I don't think it is difficult to learn at all... it surely doesn't look as obscure as QERadiant or whatever. There's actually a video tutorial linked somewhere in the halflife2.net editing forums in helping to learn the interface. In my experience though, there doesn't seem to be a steep learning curve at all. Like what Pi Mu Rho said though, a lot of the difficulty comes with making GOOD maps, since it takes a lot of ingenuity with constructing something that looks good AND doesn't have a huge impact on performance, rather than having the difficulty with the interface and all that other stuff.

2.) Look above

3.) Brushes are very simple geometric shapes that make up the majority of the level's geometry. Entities are needed for things such as doors (you need something that tells the door brush that it infact is a door - also it tells the door whether it swings, it slides up, how fast it does these actions, etc.), lights, etc.

4.) DO NOT use the carve function. I never used it myself because of other much more experienced mappers telling me to not use it, but I heard that it has very ugly results with anything other than a rectangle. Oh yeah, don't use the hollow function either if you are building rooms. Even if it is a one step thing you can do, it is much better to build the room manually, mostly because when you build it manually, you now have much more control on how the room is constructed in the very beginning (for example, in some cases, you might want your walls to extend down to the bottom of the floor rather than the floor fill in the space below the walls.) Same goes with the slice function: in a lot of cases, you can save a lot of headaches later on by either using vertex manipulation or by resizing the brush you wanted to cut.

Oh, and don't expect your first few maps to be masterpieces. If they end up real shitty, learn from it and continue on.

 

[Psychx]

i have recently been looking into modeling and mapping, and this thread really helped me, i think something like this should be stickied...

 

[asdjkgeidg]

I think that you need to goto graphics school before you should be allowed to make a map. in fact, if you don't have a 4 year degree in computer science you shouldn't even get the SDK.
lol. Looks like I would be getting it because I have a masters in computer science. working on a electronic degree now. lol

 

[Meyer]

or you could not act like a jackass and actually be a nice guy and help new people out...

 

[GinandJuice]

Thanks a lot to all who posted the advice, it really helped me out a lot. Now only problem is I need to create spawn points so i can actually load/test the map. :hmph: And also one more question, how do i scale the map so that I know hoe big it is? Im making a room, but i think it might be a lot bigger than it looks. Any tips?

 

[Ti133700N]

The first thing you should do when you make a map is to place an info_player_start entity to get the right scale for your map.

 

[Adamtehgreat]

yeh WTS asdjkgeidg? I personally don't care what you do or how negative you want to be to anyone 'inferior' to you. Everyone is different and not everyone gives a flying flip about calculus (the root of all evil/base of electronic degree). I have a years experience with Microelectronic Engineering and am starting my Degree in 3D animation for work with the gaming industry; am I not qualified to use a GAME DEVELOPMENT PACKAGE whilst in a degree that specificly works with games?
You think a computer science degree should be required?
Pull your freaking head in. I fart in your general direction.

also, this forum rocks.

 

[KoreBolteR]

asdjk..whatever, stop showing off, personally, every 1 has a right to make maps and models, as long as they have the will power and are determind, and actually enjoy it, they will get really good. WITHOUT the 4 year lame course. lol