[article] Displacement Domes

This is a discussion topic for the article "Displacement Domes" by Imbrifer which can be found here

Article description:

How to make the inside and outside of a dome using displacement surfaces

Well-written and well-illustrated, this tutorial is first-rate. Good job.

Very good and useful... But some of your pictures are mixed up? After the stage where you delete the curved guide brush, they're out of order and hard to follow. Get that fixed and this will be VERY useful to me, thanks a lot.

O.o needs to make this! nj. *compelled to make in one sitting O_o . btw the more you make something the faster you can make it ^_^. it took me eons the first time mazemaster taught us how to make hollow spheres , now its ez$$ to do for the 300th time.

Oh and very to the point concise step by step details.

Awsome tutorial m8, verry nice and helpfull, great stuff!

This is wonderful! I dunno If I'll ever use it, but hell, It may just be on the next map i release!

Good explanation, though I think models might be somewhat easier to construct. Then again, with all the overhead of compiling them and such, they might not.

Seems like a good tut to attach an example map to :o

Just wondering , is it possible to make subdivision maps a prefab and can u copypaste and rotate to make a whole circle?

Parakeet, I believe so, but you wouldn't need to make is a prefab to copy, paste and rotate

Just group it all together, and then save it as a prefab. Prefabs just need to be grouped, I believe.

Woojay for the tutorial.

Very iffy... I've worked alot with displacements and I've worked out much better ways of doing hollow domes and other shapes than this method.

Myrk-.. care to elaborate?

Use the subdivide option, it does miracles
you could probably do a dome like this within a minute with a clever subdivide setup

i made this tunnel that way:
http://insurgencymod.net/team/upload/Users/Pericolos0/tunnel.jpg

Subdivide always retains the straight edges of the brush, and thus cannot be used to make simple domes. While some dome-ish creation could be made by using several brushes and deleting the extra ones, it would indeed be difficult to get a dome of a specific size, arch and depth using subdivide and a bit of vertex manipulation.

Plus, once you've done this once or twice, it's a snap

Personally I do not feel that anyone who has not attempted to try a tutorial out should post a score/rating upon it. If you the user, do not take the time necessary to ascertain "IF" the tut is worthy, your score is meaningless.

Maybe mappers like me and Peri have actually done most tutorials that are posted on the snarkpit, and any others are easy to understand.

(@Myrk)
Perhaps you are oversensitive. Imagine for a second that I was referring to the high scores.

This does not explain how to make an inside dome at all...

all it says is 'repeat step 2 using the inside displacement' err, wtf?

First off, Imbrifer very nice tutorial and fairly helpful. However, I would like to add that a person working with displacements can also reduce the paint geometry distance to values below whole number integers if they are wanting to align the vertices of the displacement to the guide brush vertices. For example, if my displacement faces aren't forming a straight line from the outer quarter cylinder to the inner quarter cylinder, I can reduce my move distance (with spatial moving disabled) to .025, .01, .005, .001 and perhaps lower. There is no problem doing this as BSP will not treat it as world geometry and you will get the best possible alignment for your displacement faces. This can save users headaches in the long run when they find they are completely unable to align a vertex.

Also, be sure to use the 2D viewports to help alignment, especially on the Z axis where it is the most difficult when you are viewing all three axes. A useful trick I have found for this is to VIS group each concentric cylinder brush into its own group (bottom in VISgroup 1, second from bottom in VISgroup 2, third from bottom in VISgroup 3 et cetera).

Thanks for the awesome articles!
Goonlobster

Edit: Using your Face Normal option and alt-right clicking to set the movement axis perpendicular to the face also saves you time when you have to constantly toggle between the X and Y axes as it will pretty much drop it right next to the desired vertex you are aligning. Be patient, though as the alt-right click method can be tricky.