Curved Pipes

Someone (might have been Reno or Kornflakes, one of you regulars anyway) posted a nifty Tutorial on curving pipes around corners, which made them look very nice and saved a fair amount of effort. Alas I cannot find it here and forgot to save the damn thing to my HD, so if anyone could link me/PM me or e-mail then I would be most grateful.

t'was mine, I unfortunately found that in some cases it looked fine in editor no errors but looked slightly off point in game. Perhaps it was just a VHE error, But I really dont know.

I may bung it back up, But atm im worried its not a good tut.

actually korny, it was a very good tut.....the problem is a vector math one...ive been trying to figure it out for close to a year now....everything has to be based on a 1 to 1 ratio, and i still havent found the correct ratio for bending pipes ....ive seen some good ones out there, but not quite "realistic"....im still working on it  :heee:

anyway, i'd say, "put it back up man"... :wink:

Dr Brasso... :dodgy:

I suppose you could always put it in with a model, if you wanted a very nice curvy pipe (though really that method is more suited to the new breed of FPS games).

Well for a start models aren't lit very well, anything would be an improvement of the corners I have at present though.

If you don't want to post it again, do you mind PM ing me it Korn?

Thanks for the help guys.

I have all the images m8, I dont have my written text anywhere though :/

http://www.dazhampton.co.uk/misc/

look for tutimg01 etc

Dare I say: Path Duplicator?

Path Duplicator!

There! I dared!

korn? do you really have to do all those steps...couldnt you just take three slices of those pipes and the morph them to fit in where you need it?

but anyways, i would say put it back up, just from the pix it looks to be a complex detailed tut.

P.S. schmung i noticed in korns archive, he has a "pipe" zip file, that has the .rmf file used to creat that tut, i would suggest DL that and check it out, might help ya.

Duly saved and whatnot. Thanks muchly guys.

Sinner_D said:
korn? do you really have to do all those steps...couldnt you just take three slices of those pipes and the morph them to fit in where you need it?

Yes, But how do you know where exactly to put each point? The idea of the tut was that it created a guideline. Its very difficult to guess the 1st vertex correctly & then guess the rest in some sort of line without having an oddly shaped pipe.

This method entails vertex manipulation, a bit of time (no more than a minute or two), and some common sense. In general, it's much neater than some other methods I've seen.

...a minute or two for guys like you CJ....me?...an hour for a sixteen sided 90 degree bend....and im a drafting geek.... ....doesnt say much for my abilities does it.... :heee:

Doc B... :dodgy:

 i do however, love the fact that for all tenses and purposes, the method circumvents the squirrely "cylinders"....woot!

/me is happy that at least one person is using his example ...

/me pets CJ

um, how on earth do you put a vertex half way through 2 points?

I'm guessing that's not a one unit grid is all. Otherwise, you'd have to resort to QuArK for floating point vertices.

Dietz said:
/me is happy that at least one person is using his example ...

/me pets CJ

Well actually I stole it from ken20banks. But still, you clarifyed it for me I guess. :smile:

/me purrs

personally in a curved pipe situation I'd opt for using a model...unless you have a truely tricky lighting situation.

KoRnFlakes said:
um, how on earth do you put a vertex half way through 2 points?

 is this what your asking KoRn?

Er, No fishy. He was talking about moving a vertex, and manually placing it between two grid units on a one-unit scale. What you demonstrated is a Face Split. A bit of a difference :smile:

ic. so he was refering to the pic showing the 1:4 , 2:1 ratio thing.

ah well.

i suppose u could get that pic on a 1 unit grid if u were to make the pipes to the right ratios, and then resize them.  :razz:

I think you're over-analyzing that curved pipe thing. First, don't use a real cylinder (well, a cylinder that Hammer produces); it's best to use a hexagon or octagon with all vertices aligned to the grid. Then just follow those slopes and it will be pretty easy; and the player will never notice they aren't real cylinders anyway.

And using a curved pipe model probably won't work too well, as model lighting is calculated by the light level of the ground directly below the model. It won't match the lighting of the rest of the piping.

lighting on the model is calculated from where the origin is...so if you place it properly there is no problem.

No, say there's a red light above the pipes, and then a yellow light below the pipes. The top of the pipes will be red-ish, the bottom will be yellowish. But that won't happen with a model; it will just be yellowish because that's what on the bottom. It won't match.

for the question about vertex manioulation, just make the cylinder the
size that it would be at the largest side. Then, use the clipping tool
and this will align all veritcies to the end point, in a neat clear
line.

wtf? this thread is from almost two years ago.

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i eat paint

i never had trouble with curved pipes... odd.

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.else /me ~kill you
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