What's a good way to make background buildings?

[Tiberius]

The map I'm making is intended to be entirely indoors; however, I have translucent, breakable windows in most of the rooms. Also, the second floor of the building has the roof torn off.

I would like to give some decent looking background buildings, as if the map were in the middle of a small city. On one side of the map, I would especially like to have a (static) combine "building harvester". I'm not sure what those are actually called, but I think you get the idea...

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

 

[Deleter]

for any faces not seen by the player, use the nodraw texture. also, use big blocks with the right textures to eliminatethe most possible geometry.

 

[Viperidae]

Look in the props_buildings folder. There's quite a few there, but it doesn't have any combine buildings.

 

[Tiberius]

Hopefully, I'm missing a step somewhere. If I create a prop_static and give it a model from props_buildings, the resulting model is about half the size of the player.

Should I be using something other than prop_static? It doesn't seem like you can scale the model...

 

[Viperidae]

Those are skybox buildings. There are a few models that are fullscale, but unfortunately not too many. Just pick one that doesnt have '_skybox' or does have '_fullscale' at the end. Yes you should use prop_statics.

 

[Tiberius]

Beautiful! Thanks, that makes it a lot more clear. Do you know if there any sites with additional full scale models? As you mentioned there are precious few supplied with the SDK.

Thanks!

 

[ReaperSWE]

what do you need the full-scale buildings for?!
just make a 1/16 scale 3d-skybox...

 

[Meyer]

this is a toturial for 3D skyboxes... it isn't that hard, you should try it.

http://www.interlopers.net/content.php?article.86

 

[Tiberius]

OK, I understand the 3D skybox a lot better now. I didn't get the point before...