[article] Perfect 90 Degree Curves

This is a discussion topic for the article "Perfect 90 Degree Curves" by The SnarkPit which can be found here

Article description:

The cylinder method!

Uhm... you do know there's an arch tool, right?

Yeah, this looks like overkill. The arch tool does the same thing in 3 steps.

Arch tool would do this much easier with fewer brushes.

The arch tool blows

as for this tutorial its never a good idea to make floors and walls off of anything smaller than the 4 unit grid, as you'll just be pulling out your hair if you change something or mess it up and find out later you have a leak. the curve be close enough that nobody will be able to tell the difference anyway.

I'll take Captain's, Azelito's, and omega's word that the arch tool could probably be faster, and just as effective -- as for myself, I never learned how to operate it, so that would probably explain why this method is of lower quality than what you guy's use. I respect all of your opinions; I hope this tut ain't completely useless :/

@Yak: Good point in saying that no-one would notice a 4 unit imperfection anyway. The one area where it might make a difference, would be in texture alignment. I have found that doing trim this way has given me near perfect texture alignment for textures that tile, like a bar texture for instance -- for this reason, I might advise to stay on a grid of 1 when doing the nit picky parts of this tutorial, otherwise you'd probably be just fine on a grid of 4.

I swear I am so crap at the arc tool. I do what I want and the arc comes out all retarted. Nice tutorial, I'll rate this once I read it but with all half-life tutorials I found on the interwebz, I save them onto my computer and put them in a special folder. I have a massive libary of tuts now and I often go there for help. This once going in the collection. But yeah I rate when I read.

Arch tool will give off-grid locations, which may cause really annoying and hard to find errors later on, unless you go in and wobble each of the verticies by hand. I think making the curve by hand (like it is done in this tut) is the best way.

Also, making the curve by hand teaches principles of brush making that can extend to other aspects of mapping where you can't simply use the arch tool.

QuArK had such an amazing arch/cylinder/tube tool. You could do all this in like, three steps. But I don't think anyone uses it anymore.

I would like some help with this :(. I have no idea what to do when it talks about the vertex and clipping parts. I need better detail on that. Would anyone be willing to help?

Looks simple, but I didn't know you could do it this way. Nice!

I think that the new Hammer tries to snap to grid cylinder edges now, but it doesn't really help much for this kind of architecture.

[edit] - I just relized, for a perfect 90? curve, shouldn' the circles have identical centers? Sorry if that was mentioned somewhere already.

In response to reaper: technically yes. But make a walkway that way and then make one this way and say that this way doesn't look more natural. Also, from a gameplay perspective, this curve is a bit more forgiving in keeping players physically on the walkway - depending on placement this could be crucial. This method actually makes the pathway wider through the curve than on the straightways.

It's kind of like Greek architecture... it looks correct and balanced from a distance, but when you get up close and start chugging the math, you see the pillars aren't perfectly cylindrical, the buildings are slightly trapezoidal, and so on.

Not bad