Building off the grid

[Neb]

I'm just starting this topic because I'm building a section of city streets, and they've taken on a curved, organic direction, so I wanted to know if there's a good approach to building like this, and what all the pitfalls are before I get too far into mapping something unworkable.

 

I was having a think about how to make houses - complete with interior - that would be at an angle to the grid. Would it be best to make it to the grid first, save the whole thing separately in case of needed revisions, and then place it all at an angle?

 

If there was a way to snap vertices to the vertices of other brushes/patches editing might become quite a bit faster. So far, for small changes I've been using ctrl-G to snap a vertex to the grid, and then select vertices from another object, snap them, and line them up. Is there a better workflow for this?

 

Slightly unrelated but, is there an easy way to get neighbouring patches to line up properly with each other? I'm trying to use a few for streets, but getting them connected at a T-junction without a small gap seems very tricky.

 

Is there anything that I should be aware of?

[Melan]

I was having a think about how to make houses - complete with interior - that would be at an angle to the grid. Would it be best to make it to the grid first, save the whole thing separately in case of needed revisions, and then place it all at an angle?

Yes. Unlike Dromed, DR handles the rotation of several brushes very well, you you could conceivably build not just a front but an entire house at 90 degree angles, and then rotate it 5-15 degrees. Building to the grid, however, is generally good practice.

[Neb]

Right. Most of my experience is from Blender, where the grid is fairly passive.

 

Thanks for the encouragement. I don't think I could keep too rigidly to 90 degrees for city mapping since it feels good to disobey linear arrangements.

 

However, I think I'll keep my important buildings on the grid. A church at an angle might become a pain.

[Serpentine]

With regards to rotation etc - Its fairly safe to stop things looking square so long as you keep some sort of grid to manage the visportals etc. As Melan said rotating the entire building after construction is quite safe and easy; the only thing you have to look out for is entities which may(almost always wont) rotate how you want them - but with a bit of logic and thinking you can work out how to adjust them quite easily! As for actually working with the grid, just remember to use your number keys to swap between grid sizes easily, also remember that you dont want to go too low, the number of issues with working at 0.125 etc are quite annoying to fix later on and make touching up before release a pain. Aligning vertices and faces is always a good idea if you've been working with CSG tools or any other fiddly stuff.

 

Remember when rotating that you will most likely need to use more tricks to visportal 'nicely' such as dropping a wall(s) of skyportal to seal the building etc. Also remember when constructing a city area that open windows and such should have range-dependant portals to seal them when the player is far away... but these are not really on topic of this thread.

[Diego]

Isn't there a way to work in a local coordinate system? This should be useful

[demagogue]

You do need to watch out for some pitfalls, though.

I built a house at 10 degrees off the grid in PD and ran into a few little problems. (Now I can't remember if I built it at 10 degrees or built it then rotated it, or some combination).

 

Anyway, I think when you rotate things, the verticies will be put at some arbitrary point (3.409687345987), and there may be a little fudging with the rounding so things aren't seamless anymore like they may have been when you built them (but not sure about that; and this may be for stuff built *after* rotating, not before and all rotated together). My angled house had a number of white-lines/sparklies I think because of this effect(?), which I believe happen when you have intersections that aren't 100% seamless (not a huge problem, though, just noticeable).

 

But what I do know is that where stuff off the grid intersects with stuff on the grid; it's hard to build seamless connections there, and you might have some tiny slivers at the intersections (which may cause problems like the portal-effect). For similar reasons, after you've rotated the whole thing, *adding* new brushes at the angle might be hard impossible to fit seamlessly... so it's good to build everything you want and *then* rotate.

 

Also you want to think about visPortal placement in advance, because visPortals need seamless intersections (and no internal-leaks in the areas they close off) to work properly. It shouldn't be a problem, just takes 2 seconds of thought to make sure you aren't making it hard to visPortal later.

[jdude]

What I think is best is to simply use vertex manipulation to build the houses on grids. No one will notice in a room if two walls aren't exactly parallel to eachother and then you end up with all your vertecies on grids which is really nice if you ever have to go back and edit anything.

[Komag]

I recommend building on grid, always. But you can do some angled stuff if you're smart about it. 45 degrees is easy peasy, just make everything exactly diagonal. But you can stay on grid and build everything 2 to 1 for instance, where the wall lines go over two for every one they go down, and this angle is pretty different enough to look "organic" and "off grid" for variety's sake, but still be clean and perfectly on grid for the engine's sake.

[jdude]

The worst things that can happen is that one day something will mess up and your rotated building will go off the grid and there will be a leak. You'll likely end up working with a .125 grid trying to fix it without changing the shape of the building and trust me, working with a .125 grid is the worst thing ever in DR. I made that mistake a long time ago and vowed to never go below 1 for outer walls EVER again

[ungoliant]

The worst things that can happen is that one day something will mess up and your rotated building will go off the grid and there will be a leak. You'll likely end up working with a .125 grid trying to fix it without changing the shape of the building and trust me, working with a .125 grid is the worst thing ever in DR. I made that mistake a long time ago and vowed to never go below 1 for outer walls EVER again

 

i've been working on .125 for the past couple of weeks on some special problem areas, and its tedious. And i'll go ahead and put my 2 cents that the worst thing that can happen when working with angled areas is if you are aligning angled edges of brushes/patches by snapping them or their vertices to grid, and accidently snap something to grid that you didn't mean to, it will misalign it from whatever it was adjacent to (if that piece isn't snapped), and at .125... well... its hard to spot, and chances are you wont even know you did it until much later. speaking from experience here, it sux.

[demagogue]

In Dromed there was a function to highlight brushes that weren't snapped to the grid at the current level. That might be a good thing for DR (if it isn't there already) for this kind of issue.

[Jesps]

In this mansion I'm working on I have a lot of walls that are 45 degrees. I made it by using the cutter tool to get them to stay on the grid. This way some of the walls become a little thiner or a little thicker than the north-south, east-west walls, but it si not something you notice in-game.

 

[image: First floor and outdoor areas]

[jdude]

Wow that looks really cool

[Goldchocobo]

In this mansion I'm working on I have a lot of walls that are 45 degrees. I made it by using the cutter tool to get them to stay on the grid. This way some of the walls become a little thiner or a little thicker than the north-south, east-west walls, but it si not something you notice in-game.

 

[image: First floor and outdoor areas]

 

That looks very impressive. you rocked that cutter tool!

[Neb]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I think I'm going to try and use strange angles only for façades for the time being, considering this is the first proper map that I'm making.  What I've done so far hasn't exactly been hard - just too time consuming. I'm trying to think ahead for visportals too, and streets really are something else to plan for.

 

How do I use this cutter tool? I couldn't find it on the wiki.

 

Also, Diego's idea of a local coordinate system sounds really interesting. Bet it's tough to implement though.

 

 

[ungoliant]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I think I'm going to try and use strange angles only for façades for the time being, considering this is the first proper map that I'm making. What I've done so far hasn't exactly been hard - just too time consuming. I'm trying to think ahead for visportals too, and streets really are something else to plan for.

 

How do I use this cutter tool? I couldn't find it on the wiki.

 

Also, Diego's idea of a local coordinate system sounds really interesting. Bet it's tough to implement though.

 

 

 

technically its the clipper tool, hotkey x by default. use 2 (or 3 if your frisky) points to establish a plane to shear through brushes. very useful even if you're not trying to finalize shapes, for adding or removing vertices from brushes, or for dividing brushes to texture pieces of it differently. personally i've been using that clipper to manually construct hollow cylinders and cones for towers in my mission, among other things. since the result of the clippings are automatically aligned and airtight, its a very nice safeguard against leaks. tedious and time consuming but if you can work it proper, its a godsend.

 

regarding that coordinate system, i don't think its too far a stretch of the imagination considering every brush and patch already has its own individual local coordinate system of sorts (2D) on each face for texturing. try out the texture tool and see what i mean.

 

edit: OR, hows this as food for thought: Instead of localizing a coord system for a specific set of selected objects, instead, implement a grid rotation tool that effectively just rotates everything in your map around the origin of the map itself, but leaving the grid itself aligned straight up and down in the users view, allowing a SIMULATED coordinate system at the angle of your choice. this would be super ass easy to implement. select all, rotate around origin of map. granted atm theres no way to actually select the origin of the map, but i can't imagine it would be terribly difficult to set the rotatable origin of a selection of objects manually to a point like, say, (0, 0, 0). granted you'd definitely want a reset to default button in case you get lost.

Edited April 1, 2010 by ungoliant

[ungoliant]

woops accidental double post

Edited April 1, 2010 by ungoliant

[demagogue]

The clipper tool is very useful. I'd use it any day over the dreaded brush-subtract tool! It takes more effort, but you're in much greater control and the results are so much cleaner & workable.

[Neb]

Oooops. Yes, I know the clipper tool well. "Cutter" threw me off. I haven't even used the CSG subtract thingy yet, but I know its evils from other programs.

 

I didn't even think to use the clipper for diagonal editing.

Edited April 1, 2010 by Neb