zero area child patch

My map seems to run fine but when I compile I get three lines that say

"zero area child patch"

Ive googled that phrase and it brings me to an article on this board where a fella had posted his compile log.

Im guessing that I used a brush and using the morphing tool I somehow made a side of the brush have 0 area.... Am I right here? And... is there a tool/console command that I can use to locate the problem?

Post your compile log in its entirety, there may be clues buried within!

ALT+P can locate certain errors. I'm unsure if it can locate this type, but try anyway just in case.

You're quite right. It means that SOMETHING has a side that is 0 in size. This has happened to me in my first mapping days. When you use the "create brush" tool and accidentally pressed enter after clicking on the very small box. Now, normally it will create a box 1x1x1 , but if you have it set to snap to grid then all the points align to the same point. The way to find where it is use VisGroups to hide all entities, then highlight all brushes and deselect all the brushes you can see . soon you should be able to see a small highlighted pinpoint that is your microbrush.

the three lines are for length width and heighth.

Surely you can only do that when the offending face is part of a microbrush though? What if you have a face on a macrobrush that is causing this?

You can find it on a macrobrush a different way. It's easier. Look for any macrobrushes that have what look like altered vertices. This can happen when you put two vertices in one spot and don't answer "yes" to the question: "Merge Vertices?" that pops up. Anything you remember moving vertices on will be subject to your scrutiny.

Also, It's not unheard of that the CARVE tool while displacing cylinders can cause this problem as well. Since the carve tool uses a Tangent calculation on cylinders and spheres, the more face-rich of these shapes are subject to approximations in the calculations. leaving a 0.2994856 face which is still a 0 face.

awesome, thanks for the tips folks. I didnt get it figured out because I had to load an older version of the map I was working on. Luckly in that former version I didnt have this problem. How I have two "WARNING: Cluster portals saw into cluster" that Im going to try and figure out... <starts searching snarkpit and google...>

I could be that the lightmap or texture is aligned perpendicular, or that the face is a line, since lines have zero area too.