HL2 Map Design Question: Brush or Mesh?

Cool explanation, Zaphod. Looks like a solid enough system.

Question, though, is there much use for displacement mapping outside of terrain applications? Or is there any sort of comparison to Q3/D3's patch meshes? The patch meshes give a level of control that it would take another piece of software to do in any other engine. When you do need a model, one plugin for Lightwave and you can export to the modeler and bring the model in-game with 2 clicks. Personally, I think combining the patch meshes with models gives you the most control possible over your raw geometry and it keeps pretty much all of it in the hands of a designer in the editor, though most of us can and do build our own models from time to time.

That's another question for you Unreal/Source lackeys - how many of you do your own prop models and how many have the art team do them for you? If you do build them, do you guys texture them as well?

We almost never do them ourselves. We can, but it's probably best not since we need to focus on other things.

i think its a shame that you dont do those things yourself

i see these things as ART and i believe you would have much more quality if you would do it yourself (if your good at it) and ofcourse no one knows better what you want for your map than yourself. but at the other hand i can understand that in a big company there isnt any room for this because you probably mostly work on the ideas of others.

If you work in a professional company and you can model basic things, it certainly is an advantage because you can quickly build temporary structures, slap them in the editor and check out if your idea works instead of waiting for an artist to build the object for you and might waste his and your time if you aren't going to use it in the end.

In the end, an artist devoted to making mesh bits is going to do a high quality job. I personally prefer this way because, 1. I'm not that good with max/maya/lightwave/photoshop, and 2. it frees up my time to focus on making gameplay as good as possible.

Level design is getting to a point where it takes several people to make a map. The title of Level Designer should probably be something more like Gameplay Designer.

unfortunately i have to agree with you tom

especially if you have seen the unreal engine3 movie from last E3.

i believe it would allmost take a complete team to create just one map for that engine or else it would take ages to finish one. dont know if thats a bad thing you would obviously help out each others problems much more easily but still think its a shame creating something on your own is much cooler i think

team effort, baby!

I don't even work at a professional company so fuck me, but I find that creating modifications of models, skins or textures is pretty piss easy and often suits my purposes but making anything scratch results in “programmer art” style results.

aside from the terrain, which is really only good for terrain, there are no patch meshes or anything like that, everything has to be modeled in a modeling package and compiled/exported and placed as a model in hammer. For bloodlines, each level designer was more like a level artist, we did all of our own textures and models, essentially doing every level from scratch. This method had it's pros and cons, although I could see taking a different approach for the next project, I think this method eventually served best for the situation we were faced with.

Quote from Zaphod

aside from the terrain, which is really only good for terrain, there are no patch meshes or anything like that, everything has to be modeled in a modeling package and compiled/exported and placed as a model in hammer. For bloodlines, each level designer was more like a level artist, we did all of our own textures and models, essentially doing every level from scratch. This method had it's pros and cons, although I could see taking a different approach for the next project, I think this method eventually served best for the situation we were faced with.

Aww, I wanted to be able to create smooth pipes without any of this modelling non-sense. I thought the new Hammer had a torus-tool just for such a purpose?

A torus tool y'say?

Imagine the mayhem that a bit of carving could do....

Mmmm.

To be honest I wouldn't mind having to model simple details like pipes. It's the complex ones I'm worried about.

"modeling nonsense".

ohhhh boy

See, this is why I love the D3 editor. Save the file in LW and pop it into the editor. No exporting, no compiling, there automatically. Can even change large models to BSP geometry on compile to get proper VIS culling. And a pipe? No loading another program, making a pipe, saving, exporting, etc. Drag a brush, 2 clicks, boom! 2 keypresses or so and maybe a couple clicks later and it's perfectly textured, too. *huggle* You do need one LW plugin to export files out of the editor to LW nice and smoothly, but once you have that it's an incredible back-and-forth process. It's really nice having the powerful geometry editing within the editor as well as the ability for some crazy model work.

Zaph: That's cool that you guys do all your own stuff, though, says a lot for your entire team. *pets* Did you (and any others) know all that before you got there, or was it more on-the-job training?

Klein: I demand Beyond Good and Evil paraphernilia. Now.

Quote from DD

We almost never do them ourselves. We can, but it's probably best not since we need to focus on other things.

it all depends on how a studio divides up workload. sometimes it's faster to and better to have level designers work only on map layouts and BSP construction while having modellers build all the meshes. similar for texture artists. or a person at a studio may do everything for one map at a time.

it all depends on the resources and the project management philosphy at the studio.

if you are a custom mapper on your own, learn modelling, or partner up with a modeller looking to help out a level designer. same for texturing.

pretty obvious.

yea, I learned to model and texture after I got hired at Troika. There is no "torus" tool are anything like that, you would not want to make a pipe out of world geometry for any reason anyway, for the reasons I spelled out above. Having to ability to go back and forth between a modeling package very easily would be very nice, the closest thing to that in source is that you can export world geometry with texture into xsi, but to get anytihng back into worldcraft it has to be set up and compiled as a model. The whole one uber mapper vs. a team of people argument is hard to theorize about, becuase every project and studio is different and has different circumstances, so wether one ends up being better than the other is only really able to be analyzed on a case by case basis. But like I always say when people ask me, it can't do anything but help you to know how to do everything, should the need arise.

humm I have some questions zappy, dunno if someone already asked this (2 lazy 2 read everything)

1) Can models act like entities ? Like having a modelled door, or a rotating one, cuz u dont need to animate it if it is an entity.

2) How does HL2 lighting works ? I think that there are no light patches are there ?

3) Will the models be clipped automatically ?

Yeah, streamlined workflow is a big plus. Direct import from 3dsmax/maya would be a huge boon.

Quote from Minotauro

humm I have some questions zappy, dunno if someone already asked this (2 lazy 2 read everything)1) Can models act like entities ? Like having a modelled door, or a rotating one, cuz u dont need to animate it if it is an entity.

2) How does HL2 lighting works ? I think that there are no light patches are there ?

3) Will the models be clipped automatically ?

1) yes, many entities use models. In some cases you make invisible entities made out of world brushes and parent a model to them.

2) like in hl1, lightmaps.

3) you build a very low poly collision model that gets compiled into the model as the collision

Quote from Zaphod

3) you build a very low poly collision model that gets compiled into the model as the collision

Interesting... :monocle: