rubble walls

So I want to create a rundown sort of effect in a building I am mapping and I also want to be able to provide places for people to get in and out of the building where it would be kindda dumb to have a door. What I'm wanting to create is a wall which has an opening that looks like it has been blasted open by a cannon or some such explosion type thing. The problem is that I have no idea how to go about it! My thoughts are to just start with a plain wall and then carve from it with other brushes. Is there a better, more efficient way of accomplishing this effect and making it look good? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I think there's quite a lot of those type of model in props_debris. Just create a prop_static or something and voila, there's your wall. If you don't want to use these then you can do a good-ish effect using brushes.

DO NOT carve it :razz: Carving sux

What you should do is try to make it out of several brushes, and use a lot of vertex manipulation. It might be hard to get right but worth a try if you don't want to use models.

Neural Scan said:
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DO NOT carve it :razz: Carving sux
...

Why does carvng suck? Is it a mega hit on performance or does the process of carving not work very well within Hammer? Just curious since carving is one of the things I was going to be doing soon as part of an idea.

Carving (at least in all previous versions of hammer) is notorious for several reasons. It splits brushes in a less than optimal way, creating more polys than you would get doing it with the clip tool. More importantly, the carve tool can cause some very strange errors and produces off-grid brushes. A very big no no. Go into hammer and try using a cylinder to carve a wall. You ought to get a fairly dramatic demonstration. of the points I have raised.

Use some prop_static models, there are loads of decent blasted walls and floors in the props_debris dir. You might even be able to use props_debris/concrete_spawnhole001a.mdl as a wall if you're clever about it, and that would be ideal :smile:

ACK! That's a bummer, since carving, if worked correctly, would be SOOoo friggin useful and fast to do some of the stuff I had in mind. If it's previous 'actions' are notorious for doing very bad things (as you describe) it sure seems like something that would be readily known to the devs and repaired, not carried over into the new and improved editor that supports new Source engine. I'll try it out to see, but most CERTAINLY on a blank new map! Wouldn't want it to trash the one i'm working on ATM that's for sure. Thanks for the info.

EDIT:

I did a test on a wall that was 32 thick, floating in a room not touching anything else. I carved a hole in it using an 8sided cylinder. It made a nice hole and the wall became (looks logical) 8 parts like offsetting triangles. Did the problems you described happen under this scenario or does the wall need to be touching other things for it to show up, etc. Just want to see if can reproduce those kinds of problems based on your (or someone else's?) experience by duplication. Really hate to think they wouldn't fix something so important.

I've tinkered with the different debris items for creating rubble walls
and I marked both your answers right because there are a lot of
different ways to do what I was asking!

Thanks guys

There is a seperate thread for why not to use carving, but here is a summary:

Carving will never be fixed, because it is working exactly as it
should, but humans are smarter than computers, therefore a human can
generally do a better job than the standard carve algorithm, therefore
it is up to the human to make sure that the carve alogrithm doesn't do
anything that would decrease the performance of the map.

This is in many cases as much trouble as doing the same thing without
carve, therefore most people do not bother even learning how to use
carve properly.

Use carve only when you can't find a better way. Planning stuff before doing them generally helps you to avoid mistakes.

I've seen a few tuts that explain efficient carving and you're right.
Its just a lot of work preparing for the carve that can be done in the
same time as clipping.