Displacement Surfaces

I used the tutorial Reno wrote on the displacement surfaces, the nifty
tool to get a quick 'n dirty terrain, but when I compile there's a
problem: the brush on the side of the terrain looks weird ... I get a
shader error when I enter the game, but I didn't apply any shaders on
that brush, hell, I don't even know how to do that ...



(the bottom of the brush looks very green, and so are the sides)

Forceflow said:
(the bottom of the brush looks very green, and so are the sides)

Maybe it's the material?

I'm not seeing anything green?

(that's not on the screenshot)

Forceflow said:
(that's not on the screenshot)

if its relevant, perhaps it should be??

damn, i wish i had the real editor.. this waiting is getting thin :sad:

It isn't really relevant.

The brush on the side of the displacement surface just goes funky on the colors, and that's my problem.

Anyone who can fix this ? (maybe reno, since he wrote the tut ?)

Is the texture on the side supposed to be the same texture as the ground? Or did you set it to something different?

I would try applying a different texture to the sides of the brush.

It's something different from the displacement surface texture, yes.

Hmmm, maybe you could select and reapply the same texture now that the displacement affect has been applied?

Sorry I can only provide guesses

Nope, same problem.

A problem with displacement surfaces is that the face of the brush you muck around with will be quite unlikely to meet the edges of the other faces. For this reason, source doesn't seem to render them*, as likely you would have a big gap between the displaced surface and the other faces anyway, which is a result few would want. Because of this, I suggest you cover all other faces of the brush you are using a displacement surface on in the "nodraw" texture, which should hopefully get rid of your dodgy rendering issue too. No idea why its going green currently, but I assume it must just be the material you are using.

• The exception to this is that all faces that are displacement surfaces on the brush WILL be rendered, meaning you can get some rather funky terrain using minimum brushes. More on this in displacement surfaces 3 :wink:

Sorry to have marked your answer as wrong, Reno, but all I had to do
was to select a new texture for my side brush, apply it, and things
were fixed. :smile:

Maybe your method is a safer way (read: a one with a decent explanation), I'll see.

Can't wait for your next tut, m8te.

What do you mean by fixed? I'm not questioning the fact my solution
wasn't the one you used, its just that I'm trying to get a better
understanding of the displacement surfaces tool and how it works in
source but I unfortunately don't have much time to play around with the
SDK at the moment (courseworks :sad: ).

As far as I can tell from my experimenting, when you take a brush and
make one of the faces a displacement surface, only the displacement
surface is rendered while the other faces, regardless of the texture
applied, is culled. This was the case in this little test map I made,
in which the roofs of the buildings had displacement surfaces on the
top of their brushes in order to look like they had snow on them...

http://www.screenies.hlccl.com/screenies/temp/ind0001.jpg

As you can see, the snow surface renders fine, but the side and bottom
faces, which were textured in fairly standard trim and metal faces
respectively, didn't get rendered. Are you getting your newly textured
faces rendered, or are they culled in the same way as in my example? If
they are rendered, can you tell me what material you have applied on
them?

I would have thought that you need to apply the nodraw texture to all other faces of a brush you're using for a displacement surface?

You certainly don't HAVE to, but as it appears not to render the other
faces regardless of the used material you might as well I guess, just
so as to not confuse yourself and think they will be rendered,

@ Reno: This is the only glitch I currently see with displacement surfaces:
where the elevated terrain is higher than the original brush on the
sides, you get this:



The rest of the sides look fine.

Wierd, so your sides are all rendering fine? Is it definately only the
top face that is a displacement surface? Did you have the entire brush
selected when you clicked create in the displacement surfaces dialog?

No, only the top side.

edit

Sorry, I checked it for you. My whole brush is a displacement surface,
and I'm only modifying the top side. Which leaves the rendering of the
other sides ok, appearantly.

Thought so, that clears things up for me (was getting very confused over this issue!), thanks :smile: