HL2 Displacement Mapping

    I've just started playing around with displacements and I've run into some difficulty "capping" the sides of displacements.

    I tried to model a displacement road running up a slope. The road had extruded gutters and a foot path which were also displacements. I tried to creat more displacements to fill in the side of the gutter but couldn't get them to match up between the road and the gutter.

    Another application I'd like to achieve is a round building with windows cut out.

    If my discriptions make no sense I can provide some pics

    All the tutorials for displacement modelling I've found on the net have been terrain specific. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

    Sounds like an issue that might be solved by using consistently sized patches and keeping everything neat and on a large grid size. Does this sound right?

    well, not totally sure what you mean but to adress the first problem: within the displacement tools there is the ''sew'' tool. select both displacementbrushes and click ''sew'' to, yes, sew them together.

    hope this is any help

    afaik there's no way to delete faces of displacement in hammer..

    I also wouldn't use displacements for a building structure. Try to get the windows cut out with regular brush geometry, it's a bit of a bitch, but possible. Plus I imagine the lighting on something like that being less than desirable.

    Thanks for the suggestions

    Algor: I use fixed values for vertex movement and only move them on one axis at a time.

    Killertomato: Ah, somehow missed the sew tool, reckon I need to have a play with that. I don't need to delete faces, was just going to make several displacements for each element and sew them together.

    Erratic: I'm just trying to experiment and mix up the architecture in my current project. Using brushes for curves looks damn ugly. The map comprises of a small street area comprising of two accessable streets. Due to the small size I think I can afford some extra modelled detailing, relying less so on textures.

    I'm also considering creating a prop for the curves if the displacements don't work out.

    Here's a WIP of what I'm trying to achieve. Textures are placeholders.

    [Blocked Image: http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w57/m8nkey/displacement.jpg]

    Quote from killertomato

    i see now what you meant. good luck with the sew tool, as it more then often fails to sew correctly (glad it excists tho!)

    Depends how neat and regular your displacements are. If you keep things tight then sew will nearly always work.

    Quote from clayman

    lets all pray valve creates a new engine and new tools

    Compared to all the in-house tools I have used over the last seven years Hammer is very solid and stable. We have some of the best tools, engine and gameplay programmers in our studio, yet our tools are still unstable and flakey since they are in a state of constant development flux. Hammer is a pleasure to work with in comparison.

    For your builting just clip the displacement along the texture borders and sew to regular brushes on the interior..

    Unless you mean every individual window pane, which is kinda silly, but then you can just make a new translucence masked version of the texture...

    A prop would work but displacements are the best option here due to it's size, lighting, and for render expense.

    Quote from killertomato

    i see now what you meant. good luck with the sew tool, as it more then often fails to sew correctly (glad it excists tho!)

    Do you realize that the edges of the brushside from which two displacements are derived need to be co-located to be sewable?

    I didn't even know about smoothing groups until now, sounds very useful.

    http://%7boption%7d

    btw, love your displacement modelling in fof_tramonto_lite R_Yell.

    'll have a play with a few techniques when I have some spare time and I'll post the results.

    Thanks, displacements have a lot of non terrarin usages, I used them succesfully in adobe like structures and they really do a great job Smoothing groups should help when you want to get rid of hard edges in brushwork.

    I just had a play with Smoothing Groups, applying them to both displacements and brushes, and they didn't have any effect whatsoever.

    According to the wiki "The lightmap scale must be small enough that at least one lightmap luxel is small enough to fit on each face."

    I found this statement a bit ambiguous. Does this mean the lightmap scale must be 1:???:

    I played around with lightmap scale, even trying a scale of 1 and still no effect (even though this wouldn't be feasible anyway)

    Smoothing groups are a bit finicky.

    A luxel is a pixel of light. You can think of a lightmap as really low resolution texture. A lightmap scale of 1 means that there is one luxel for every one pixel, a lightmap scale of 4 means that there is one luxel for every 4 pixels.

    So, if you have a 2x2 face with a lightmap scale of 16 it can't fit an entire luxel (it'll still bit lit though, of course).

    You can view the lightmap by clicking "camera" in your 3D view and selecting "Lightmap grid"

    One quirk of smoothing groups is that there is a angular threshold, which you can change with the -smooth # compile switch on vrad. If the faces are at an angle to each other greater than this they won't be smoothed. Default is 45 degrees.

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