Angled textures
by Ferret (view all articles)
for Half-Life » Architecture
updated Wed Jul 7th 2004 at 10:57am
by Ferret (view all articles)
for Half-Life » Architecture
updated Wed Jul 7th 2004 at 10:57am
Lack of texture thought will kill any map. Unless you are going for a flat shaded look, textures will make or break a map. I'm going to help you texture your angles a little smarter. With some practice and some creativity on the application of this process, your maps will become much better.
So lets start with a simple arch support brush you might find on a building. It is a simply brush that is at 45 degrees to the vertical. Normally you'd have to either manually align by eye or understand some geometry to decide the angle in which to enter into the "rotate" field in trickier examples. We'll discuss the process in which you can put your brain power to more creative uses and forget what you geometry teacher taught you.
Now you are going to take the bottom side of this face. First check the "align to face" box. This'll remove the stretching that is occuring on the texture. Most likely the texture will be rotated so it is going 90 degrees against the way we want it to go! So go ahead and put in 90 degrees under the "rotate texture" field.
Now the last thing to do is the trick in which I'm teaching you. Click the face you just applied those settings to. While it is selected, hold ALT and right-click on the angled face that isn't aligned. The texture should align it perfectly. Now with some eyeing and creativity you can make it look best. I simply did this around all the edges to get a good look to it as you can see below.
Now another practical use! A well or something can sometimes be tricky to align the top faces too. So what we are going to first bother with is aligning the faces that go parrallel to a standing person. I usually scale my textures to 0.75 as I think they look better that way. Now, again click "align to face" on a texture. Click that face and ALT-right-click the texture to the right. It might be smart to align the first face to the left or right side so that you know the texture will not split up that face when it is compiled. As I was saying ALT-right-click the texture to its right. Now reselect the new face. ALT-right-click the face to ITS right. If you keep the first face you selected and ALT-right-click all around you'll get distortion so remember to re select after each ALT-right-click. Soon you'll have sides that are not stretched and aligned perfectly. A side note, the last face in which will touch the first face may not align.
If you have the polys to spare I'd personally break up these brushes and make something in there to explain that. But thats me being picky.
Now the fun part that'll get this all aligned. Just like you did in the last part of this lesson you'll select a face, align its adjacent face and then reselect. So select a parallel-to-person face and ALT-right-click the top face to align that. Do this all the way around.
Now whip up some creativity and do something to make it distinguishable from everyone else's statue/well areas!
So lets start with a simple arch support brush you might find on a building. It is a simply brush that is at 45 degrees to the vertical. Normally you'd have to either manually align by eye or understand some geometry to decide the angle in which to enter into the "rotate" field in trickier examples. We'll discuss the process in which you can put your brain power to more creative uses and forget what you geometry teacher taught you.
Now you are going to take the bottom side of this face. First check the "align to face" box. This'll remove the stretching that is occuring on the texture. Most likely the texture will be rotated so it is going 90 degrees against the way we want it to go! So go ahead and put in 90 degrees under the "rotate texture" field.
Now the last thing to do is the trick in which I'm teaching you. Click the face you just applied those settings to. While it is selected, hold ALT and right-click on the angled face that isn't aligned. The texture should align it perfectly. Now with some eyeing and creativity you can make it look best. I simply did this around all the edges to get a good look to it as you can see below.
Now another practical use! A well or something can sometimes be tricky to align the top faces too. So what we are going to first bother with is aligning the faces that go parrallel to a standing person. I usually scale my textures to 0.75 as I think they look better that way. Now, again click "align to face" on a texture. Click that face and ALT-right-click the texture to the right. It might be smart to align the first face to the left or right side so that you know the texture will not split up that face when it is compiled. As I was saying ALT-right-click the texture to its right. Now reselect the new face. ALT-right-click the face to ITS right. If you keep the first face you selected and ALT-right-click all around you'll get distortion so remember to re select after each ALT-right-click. Soon you'll have sides that are not stretched and aligned perfectly. A side note, the last face in which will touch the first face may not align.
If you have the polys to spare I'd personally break up these brushes and make something in there to explain that. But thats me being picky.
Now the fun part that'll get this all aligned. Just like you did in the last part of this lesson you'll select a face, align its adjacent face and then reselect. So select a parallel-to-person face and ALT-right-click the top face to align that. Do this all the way around.
Now whip up some creativity and do something to make it distinguishable from everyone else's statue/well areas!
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