[article] Arch Tool

This is a discussion topic for the article "Arch Tool" by DrGlass which can be found here

Article description:

Creating an arch that fits in a square hole

Displacement wont make a hole like this one. displacement is great if you want to make natural shapes, like a cave or rock arch. When it comes to man-made holes/arches the arch tool will work best.

Sweet, I've been needing something like this for awhile, but when would it be better to use displacement?

Nice tut though

Schmuck, I need help, I can't open the arch tool, in the prefabs toolbar I have three choices: entities, prefabs, preffabs HL2 Wut to do?

This is great! I can also use this to simplify arch making in HL1

Yep this works just as well in HL1, you'll want to use fewer sections though, try 16 rather than 32

Isnt it faster to carve a cilinder out of a cube? Then, insterting the carved cube into where you want your hole. Sure, the carve parts wont be as nicely uniformly distributed as your method, but the number of them would be the same imo, which is what matters preformance-wise. be sure to carve it out of a nodraw cube, then texturing only the inner faces afterwards.

Before opening hammer people should sign a little waiver saying they'll never use the carve option unless they want to be castrated. imo.

BlisTer, you have to remember that it renders faces no solid objects in game. So, no, that wouldn't be faster performance wise. There's no "opinion" about it. In the off chance that it has the same amount of faces both ways (carving and manually) you have to remember plane numbers inside the game.

DrGlass, seems pretty useful, I'd say (if someone hadn't tried it on their own already). This would be pretty nice to use with fans in side a ventilation system ... if you want the fans to work of course.

Very Helpful!

Ok, this rocked for putting in round windows. Thanks and good job!

Very well written and very helpful! Thanks!

I would just make a cylinder and then carve.....

update: opps i just saw that someone else said that and got an answer why lol

Is it possible to make a curve with archtool also ? If not, how am i supposed to do a big tunnel with an U-turn in it ?

( Sorry for my sad english )

Fainted, a good tool to use for making a u-turn in a tunnel is to the torus tool. It can be a litte wierd if you've never used it before though.

Jasque Aaah. Thanks for the idea. I've tryed to do some things with that tool and it have been successfull.

This is awesome, I've just made an archway with this tool, and the tutorial helped!

Effective yet simple, easily understandable. Nice tut

Wouldn't it be easier to make a cylinder, hollow it and take off the top, so you don't have to go through the things in the first picture?

But anyways, nice tutorial

No! when you hallow it creates bad joints. See this way if you want to make it bigger or smaller you can move the shared vertex on the end, but if it were hollowed the vetex of the brushes wouldn't line up and couldn't be moved.

Very good and helpful tutorial, helps me on my current project!