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Rotating overlays or decals; how?
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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by JinsokuGuy on Mon Jan 24th at 6:16am 2005

Okay, so I'm a newb map maker for Half-Life. I've practically got my map done, playtested and so forth. This is not a huge issue, but I'd love to know the answer to it, since it can't really be a Hostage Rescue map without it.

Yeah you guessed it. It's a CS:S map. A hostage map, to be precised. Anyway, I'm just trying to place the HRPOINT decal on the ground where, of course, the rescue point is. Putting it down as a DECAL would be easy enough, but it's facing the wrong direction, and all I have to do is rotate it 90degrees to the left to get it looking right. However after searching through all the menus and this site, I've found no solution.

Then I found out, hey, Overlays are supposed to be easier. So I tried that, I rotated it manually; hey, so far so good! But wait... the texture's on MIRRORED? That's right, instead of it reading "HOSTAGE RESCUE ZONE", it comes up mirrored, or backwards, "ENOZ EUCSER EGATSOH", practically. It's DRIVING me insane, because all I have to do is flip the stupid thing so it can be read right but I can't find that option _anywhere_.

What's the simple answer, please, and help me stop yankin' on my hair. I'm pretty sure I've found it already, I'm probably just missing it.




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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by omegaslayer on Mon Jan 24th at 6:59am 2005

Maybe try rotating it around with respect to the ground, as in the x-axis (side view) and not from the top (top view) [addsig]



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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by DrGlass on Mon Jan 24th at 7:09am 2005

with overlays you should see U end and U start aswell as V end & V start. U&V start should be 1.0, change this number to -1.0 that will flip it. My may only have to do -1 in U or V or both. try it, you dont have to touch any other numbers but the 1.0.
[addsig]



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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by JinsokuGuy on Mon Jan 24th at 7:10am 2005

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:

Some images in this post have been automatically down-sized, click on them to view the full sized versions:

I seemed to have answered my own question...


Okay, so this is what I kept seeing. No matter WHAT I did when I placed down an overlay, it would always appear mirrored, backwards, whatever. SO, I started toying around with the properties. Originally, without messing with it before, the properties of an overlay were U START - "0" and U END - "1".


After toying around with it, I changed U START - "3" and U END - "2", and... it fixed it. WHY it did, I really don't know why. My knowledge of Hammer and everything else isn't as vast as most of the pros I've seen on this site so far. I just map for fun. All I know is that it fixed it. So if anyone knows what the heck I just did, please feel free to inform us, (if you feel like it ).

While I'm at it, for anyone else that had a problem with this, if you also need to know how to rotate or whatever the overlay, select it, Tools > Transform at the top, and there you have all the dimensions you can rotate it to as you see fit. Huzzah.

I swear I checked in that Overlays Tutorial, but I didn't see how anything like this could be prevented. If it was in there, I certainly didn't understand it, so, sorry if this was a waste of a post. x.x

EDIT - Ooh, thanks for the responses. DrGlass, sounds like you were close to the answer. I tried that as well, but it would just rotate it (or flip it) through the brush, and wouldn't be visible. Whatever I did worked. Again, don't know why, but it did.




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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by DrGlass on Mon Jan 24th at 7:26am 2005

U start = 0
U end = -1

that should work just the same. Infact 4 and 3 would work just the same, 0 - (-1) = 1 3 - 2 = 1.

U & V are just another way of saying x & y (only they are reletive to themselves and not the world) If you texture with any 3d modeling program you will see U & V. I dont really understand them that much.


[addsig]



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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by JinsokuGuy on Mon Jan 24th at 7:46am 2005

Weird. I could've sworn I tried that and I still got it bad.

Well whatever the case, I'm glad I was able to figure it out.

I guess another question is why would it default to something ... wrong? But that's for another time, I s'pose.




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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by DrGlass on Mon Jan 24th at 8:54am 2005

I has to do with its position in the world I think. Like you can put a decal on one side of a wall and have it wrong, then place it on the other side and have it right. If you want to know more look up UV mapping.
[addsig]



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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by Sub-Zero on Mon Feb 21st at 7:06pm 2005

Thanks a bunch man.. u helped me a ton with this post.. i was killing myself trying to figure out why all my damn texture overlays were freakin mirrored.. thanks =P



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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by Rof on Mon Feb 21st at 7:12pm 2005

Decals (not overlays) pick up their alignment from the base texture of the face they are applied to. So if you rotate, flip, or scale the underlying texture, the decal gets transformed too.

For overlays, you use the UV thing.
[addsig]



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 Re: Rotating overlays or decals; how?
Posted by ReNo on Mon Feb 21st at 7:14pm 2005

I did cover this in my tutorial on the topic of overlays.
[addsig]




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