[article] Destruction using the Clipping and Vertex tools

This is a discussion topic for the article "Destruction using the Clipping and Vertex tools" by midkay which can be found here

Article description:

How to create destroyed holes realistically via the Clipping and Vertex Edit tools

Great tutorial midk, glad it finally got put up

Well written, clear, nice use of images to illustrate your point. Glad you mentioned func_detailing as well as vertex manipulation, and I like how you included the "taking it further" section. Nice of you to include the vmf as well.

What I think would be nice is to include a shot of this method compiled and in game, with the various debris, rebar, and decals you mentioned. You could probably just use a shot from dm_residential. Doesn't really effect the tutorial overall, but sometimes before someone wants to try a new method they'd like to see how it'll look in game.

Thumbs up.

Thanks, Morph! Glad you like it.

I was hoping to do this after I wrote the "Taking it further" section but I had run out of image slots. I didn't feel like working any of the earlier ones out, but maybe I can imageshack an ingame shot or two and attach them so people can get an idea.

Thanks again.

May want to take it a step further and talk about optimization by combining a lot of those pieces to form single ones. But it was well written and formatted.

I'd say dismaps are perfect for this, given or taken a few occasions where brushwork really beats them.

Anyway, good tutorial, with an eye for technical details. Even a quick overview of it reveals it's purpose, and that's well done.
Only thing I'd add is that you can use the vertex tool where you defined the edges - selecting multiple brushes at once, selecting the shared vertices with a selection box and then moving it out/inwards can save some time over clipping each edge.

Omegaslayer: Good idea, if any strips end up to be about the same "slope"; but when the strips were cut the goal was to use them all in different ways so that combining them wouldn't be necessary (i.e. don't let two next to each other go in the exact same direction). I'll probably update this with some information on that though.

Captain P: I'd have to disagree, having used displacements for broken walls about.. four times now, they're harder to work with to get the shape you want, "too dense" in some areas and too sparse in others (not enough vertices to work with on the long sides, too many to deal with on the smaller parts). They also stretch the texture they're given as I pointed out in the tutorial, so anything with a pattern will be ruined; this also screws with lightmaps, so you might have really skewed lightmaps (e.g. on the displacements I used in my map last time, vertically the voxels were spaced about 16 units apart, and horizontally around 1-2 units apart).

Interesting suggestion with the vertex tool, though.. I'll have to try this and see how it works.

Thanks for the comments.

Hmm, I can see your point. Yeah. I used them for natural holes, but man-made structures are a different thing indeed.

Ah, I'd agree that they'd probably work well for dirt/grass/natural stuff, but I have no experience with them in that regard. I know what to do now though if I ever encounter such a situation.

I'd recomend going with triangles, in this case. Tris will allow you to bend the "debris" up down left etc, without getting any invalid object errors. Ultimately, they will give you much more flexibility in the long run.

This tut actually goes on a very simple concept, but it's good to see someone put one of these tuts up -- simply by looking at the screenshots, a newb mapper can learn how to make some nice brush work

And yes, optimize those brushes! :P

"G":

I'll add an Optimization section, I think; covering merging strips together as well as NODRAWING.

Is there any reason triangles would work better here?.. you can bend the same way with this technique, just select two side-by-side strips and use the vertex editor to move their shared vertices down or up. I'll add some info on that also. I don't see how they give any extra flexibility than not having to select two strips at once, but I do see some downsides, such as being basically impossible to vary "widthwise" (this way you can cut at any point along the strip and it looks fine; using triangles you're basically limited to the size of the triangle itself). Please, correct me if I'm wrong; I'm curious about this.

Uhm, moving shared verts up and down isn't a good idea no. You'll create non-planar faces, and the compilers don't like these. Well, actually, as far as I know, brushes are saved as a serie of planes, so non-planar faces result in the brush getting reshaped.
On the other hand, using triangles can get expensive, in terms of time. In that case, modelling the hole would be an alternative, although it has it's own quirks as it's not nearly as maintainable. Using small debris props is probably the best idea then, using brushes for the rough outline.

Simple and to the point. Good for noobs..

Thanks MJ.

I should update this soon.. maybe tonight.

Vertex manipulation is faster and easier. Surely there was a HL1 tutorial that already covered this sort of method! Good tutorial though, so...

Updated the tutorial to include the vertex-editing method instead of clipping the edges - thanks, Captain P and Tracer Bullet, I've been using it for a while and it's considerably faster and easier.

Any other thoughts? I should update the screenshots soon and add one of an in-game example.

Great tut!