Geometry Split Every 1024 Units ?

"It is also worth noting that vbsp automatically splits geometry ever 1024 units of world coordinates. Extra splits can be avoided if brushes terminate evenly at a 1024 grid line. In Hammer, go to the Options dialog under the Tools menu. In the 2D Views tab, choose ?Highlight every 1024 units?. Enabling this will display red shaded grid lines in 1024 increments in the Hammer 2D views."

Now I did not understand this, I am trying to understand how and why the geometry is split and was doing fine until I came to this. I understand what it means but what can you do about it? Do you have to like make sure that you don't have an object passing over the 1024 units red line?

I suppose it's saying that you don't have to, but it helps if you do.

That is what I was thinking, but seeing how big a 1024x1024 square is, I can't see it making much of a difference

There is no "Highlight every 1024 Units" in the 2D Views tab anyway...

Yes there is, 'Highlight every 1024 grid lines'... or is that not units?

It's only units on a 1x1 grid.
On a 4x4 grid, 1024 grid lines would be 4096 units, and so on.

The only option for Highlighting every X Units is 64.

I suppose if it was on a 4x4 grid then 'Highlight every 256 grid lines' would do it. This discussion is pointless though, if it is not going to make much of a difference, I am not going to bother

In halflife 1 all architecture was split every 240units across the span
of the brush. This is similar in that every 1024 units the compiling
process cuts the brushwork. THere is no way to avoid this, however
turning the grid markers on in hammer can help you but making sure none
of your brushwork is un-nesc cut. Forinstance complex gemoetry could be
cut causing alot more fragmentation of the faces and thus causing
higher polycount and less FPS

I imagine this is still for the sake of the VIS process - by splitting the faces, there's better calculations available for defining the portal volumes and such. I think HL1 also had splits at 1024 in addition to the 240 splits, so it may also just be an artifact from there. shrug At least this time it's a nice power of 2 on the 64 grid and not related to texture scale. :smile:

But really, it's highly unlikely you're going to see any huge polycount increases as a result of extra splits like this. What little you do see is pretty negligible under the increased ceiling. And if you build on nice even grid markers anyway (keeping major structures to 64 and 128 units, for example), you won't encounter it anyway. Brushes are going to split all sorts of places you don't want them. Unless it's giving you lightmap artifacts or something, not worth worrying about. :smile: