Carving in latest Hammer for Source

A recent post said that, historically, Carving produced very bad, unexpected, trouble prone and performance problems in map creation. Can anyone that experienced those issues confirm if they still exist within the latest Hammer released with SDK? I tried some experiments with cylinders and carving into walls with it and the results seemed perfect, with the perfect number of minimum resulting 'wall parts' to accomplish the hole, with no additional unwanted chunks anywhere else.

I trust the opinions about the previous problems though I have no direct experience with Hammer prior to now, so if anyone can chime in about the "current" carving problems (or lack of problems) I'd appreciate it. I don't want to start using it then discover it has created some horrible side-effect down the road and be a nightmare to try and clean up, etc.

Thanks.

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting MeatStick</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext> I tried some experiments with cylinders and carving into walls with it and the results seemed perfect, with the perfect number of minimum resulting 'wall parts' to accomplish the hole, with no additional unwanted chunks anywhere else.

</DIV></DIV>

Did the new objects have diagonal criss-crossy lines, or did they have perfect vertical or horizontal angles?
Suggestion: stay away from carving, PERIOD, no matter how good it may get. The computer is not smarter than you are :razz:

Blueballs merely apes the traditional wisdom.

It would certainly make sense if they had made some improvements to the carve tool with the new editor. I simply do not know. Only time will tell if it has become a worthwhile feature. Experiment with it. I doubt any of the senior mappers around here will even touch it based on previous experience. It's up to you new guys to figure out the things our prejudices might lead us to overlook.

G.Ballblue said:
Did the new objects have diagonal criss-crossy lines, or did they have perfect vertical or horizontal angles?
Suggestion: stay away from carving, PERIOD, no matter how good it may get. The computer is not smarter than you are :razz:

The side view shows them perfectly horizontal. The front view shows them fan around logically to maintain the 'outter squareness' of the wall while produciing the hole in the middle by terminating around it in narrowing triangluar shapes. Looks exactly as I recall previous map editing I've done way back (not HL related) and carving stuff, so it 'seems' correct/clean.

As far as staying away from it and doing it manually, from what I can see there's physically no way to create a wall out of peices that has the hole in it, based on a 16-sided hole, that could be any-more perfect than the one the carving tool has created. I certainly understand if you fellas (and any gals around!) have been burned in the past by a faulty carving tool. At the moment, I don't see any faults. I'l mess around some more and see if I can make it puke out something bad by doing things like carving a single hole that crosses 8 or 9 seperate walls, etc, and see if it ever wigs out.

Carving is still bad, stay away.

I couldn't compare it to how it used to be - I've avoided it for so
many years now I've almost forgotten why we don't use it A quick
test shows it does cut up the brush somewhat awkwardly though - whether
its better than it used to be or not, I wouldn't use it personally.

If you mean it splits up the entire brush...that's not exactly ideal behavior. I think what you're supposed to do if you really want to use the Carve feature is first use the clip tool to break the wall into pieces so that only the smallest possible square will be affected by the carved cylinder, and THEN carving.

Edit: wow, all three at the same time o.O but what TwoKnives has posted shows how I would cut up the wall before using the carve tool just on the square...

Considering there is almost never a reason to carve anything anywhere, I don't know why anybody cares whether or not the tool works correctly now. Don't carve, especially with cylinders.

I saw somebody telling a mapper experienced with UnrealEd to just
build a big box and carve out your rooms on the verc forums. Oh
the naive youth of today's mapping world :wink:

Ok now that made good sense. I was previously only refering to the fact that it was logical in the way it automatically sliced up the brush to make a hole. I didn't account for the size of the brush it was slicing. I assume the immediate benefit of only carving the smallest-possible brush is just raw performance. The engine can deal with 16 very small 'brushes' better than 16 very large brushes. That the gist?

Also, I did an experiment and figured out at-least one way of making the Carving wig out in latest Hammer. I carved a large hole in a large brush, then copied that brush 2 more times, offset the other 2 slightly in all directions (but flush against each other) then carved a giant hole through all of them. It left some chunks-o-crap where it should have been completely 'holed'. That's not really a usable example during a normal map process but it definitely worked to make carving in the new Hammer show an apparent problem in dealing with something that complex.

It would be a time-saving feature... if it worked. Based on the example picture provided by Knives, I'd say it still doesn't. Oh well. I was actually hoping that they had found a way to make it useful.

It's always fun when you carve things and faces go off into infinity in both directions :wink: actually I've had that happen with subdividing too, but I've since then figured out what I was doing wrong so it doesn't happen anymore.

Basically the carving works the away it always have, and this has some problems:

1. It slices entire huge brushes into tiny pieces.

2. If you are carving out irregular chunks, to make a cave for example
(if you're not using displacements yet), #1 can become a big
problem.

3. Irregular cuts making diagonals also has the tendency to not really fit together due to rounding errors.

4. If you are carving using groups you might run into trouble with
pieces of junk brushes lying around that needs to be deleted
afterward. This happens because it does not carve when carving
would cause an entire brush to disappear.

5. If #4 is combined with #3, some of these pieces could be almost invisibly small and cause unexpected problems.

So only use carve if you know what you are doing, and you should know if you have read the other people's posts.

I remember having a lot of problems with carving time ago with Worldcraft in Quake 1 and Quake 2. The problems did come because of carving cilinders or complex brushes, and then the errors begun when cheking the map (ALT+P), very tiny brushes or invisible brushes (??) appeared and i had to search the map, move brushes, and delete the bad ones. This is what StormSeed said in step n. 4

Now, with hammer, i am only using carve to make the holes for windows or doors, it reduces mapping time for me, instead of edit all the brushes surrounding the hole i prefer to do carve in a brush. And the result is good, because it's a basic carve and the result is the same as if i make it. I have no problems with carve... yet ?? :smile:

carving aint THAT bad, it's just bad if you want to edit the carved wall later, becouse all the brushes are so randomly placed, clipping tha tor carving it again would make complete chaos in the 2d view and like double the number of brushes, but it you clip a small square in a wall, leave the square in it and then carve a cylinder into that, the whole wall will be like it's clipped exept the small square witch will be to small to edit more anyway.

but, still i just tend to make a cylinder i want and i build the wall around it using seperate brushes.

Don't carve, use the clip tool. It's so much better, and often faster (if you have a large map/brush).

Ok ok, so suppose we DON'T carve. How do we get the image on the left that TwoKnives posted? I mean, where to use the clip tool. You can't always use the clip tool because it doesn't necessarily line up with the pixels, and often you can't stretch the clip plane beyond the surface you want to cut to cut the plane you want. I could see how the lines coming out from the corners would be easy (just clip corner to corner) but along the surfaces of the cylinder? I'd probably still just use a carve there...I mean, you've already decided how each face of the cylinder will split the wall up, so Carve doesn't have any options but the one you want.

Well yea, clipping isn't a BAD thing, it's just extremely sloppy and inefficient :wink:

I find it much easier to build it with brushes from scratch, anyways.

Vassago5kft said:
Well yea, clipping isn't a BAD thing, it's just extremely sloppy and inefficient :wink:
I find it much easier to build it with brushes from scratch, anyways.

Really? I'm way faster clipping and manipulating. As long as some cylinder doesn't do anything funky It comes out great.

Doh, my bad. I mean't carving. Carving is evil.

Clipping kicks arse :wink:

Heres an example of some carving that I did that looks the same as
clipping. I did do some minimal clipping in order to make the small
square around the cylinder. I then carved the cylinder. On the left you
see what is the immediate result, a spiral, yes. But then I did a quick
vertex manip and got the image on the right. The result was, I feel, a
quicker way to get the same efficient results.

The only excuse for carving is when you want to cut the window part out of a textured wall.