General WIP thread

[fug4life]

Good to see others have hammer open, I've manage to finish the layout for a small map but still hitting those hammer limits.

[Andrax17]

i somehow always fear about hitting the limit before my map is finished, but then again, i am nowhere near a point where i should worry about the limit

and after working for some time with the alarm, i finally completed it (somewhat). Only thing left is to synchronize the 'pulsing' light with the alarm sound.



^ looks low quality on still image, because it has distort effect.

[fug4life]

[fug4life]

Still a busy bee with hammer at the moment, hoping to have something for the public to enjoy, thats fun and not overly labour intensive.

So I've already used the max amount of displacements on the map lay out with leaves me nothing for any other displacements and I'll eb needing more a lot more to create the visual look I want.

So I turned my studies to using 'Propper' vbsp tool that output's models from within hammer, many people are sceptical of this tool, whilst it cant do everything a modeling program can do, it can do some amazing stuff once you figure it out. And really the whole process is very quick you can compile whilst in hammer and have the finished product in about 3 seconds.

So I'm making prop_static translucent displacement models:
And because there will be very little else prop wise in my map, I'll be making probably around 50 different types of displacement models.



(left is the displacement setup to be compiled, right is the compiled model).

In game the lighting on the model is back to how it looks if it was on a brush.

I'm really impressed now that I've started to learn the tool.

[fug4life]

The final result of a few days work trying to figure things out.



What are you looking at?

a re-scaled grub_tunnel_door.mdl (scaled by x2)
2x transparent static prop (one is placed inside the other),
models made by compiling displacements as models with 'propper'.

Now I know how to do it, the rest of the models I need to make should be a breeze!

[Gary]

Looking good. It's too bad Source can only use outdated bsp with lightmaps...

[SNOWMAN7]

woah, looks great~

I sure would like to learn how to do stuff like that some day.

[fug4life]

Cheers, I'm currently making some prototype 'Antlion Prisoner Pod' /
'life sucking alien thing'.

Its not complete yet...

[SNOWMAN7]

mmm neat. Haven't ever seen a antlion tunnel map made by the community before, so I'll be looking forward you making the first one!

[fug4life]

Then consider it officially known as oc_hive

Also you can to do this sort of stuff if you've got alot of time to kill
Reading tutorials is the place to start.
I choose this type of map as its fairly simple to make.

[fug4life]

So, I've got this b*** subdivided, now for the seriously tedious job of boxing it all in with nodraws.



Its quite a well planned map but its a bit of a build and pray it all works, I'm putting in a shit load of work and haven't really got a compile together yet.

[shiftey]

Duplicate the displacements then destroy them...fix any leaks.

[fug4life]

Its better to just box round them, if you want to keep any of the internal 90 degree, corners. I've tried what you said in the past and by the time you try to get the corners sorted out, you've lost the subdivided shape.

[Gary]

Also, I am pretty sure you have to have at least the floor of the boxes textured or else lighting will get messed up. Don't quote me on that though, I just remember having a lighting problem using an all nodraw brushwork with models being fullbright.

[Tysn]

I usually just make giant nodraw boxes around displacement cave sections, with minor turn sections for some vis blocking. Mainly this is so that I can go hog-wild with a giant displacement translate tool sphere to work out any boxy-ness without having to worry about going outside any bounds. Plus it's not like you can't put up some occluders in the interior anyway.