Carve and Make Hollow in 3ds Max

[shawnolson]

Now I know that there is a raging hate of the Carve and Make Hollow functions in Hammer, but there is an equal amount of love for it. It's been a frequent request. So I created these tools with various added benefits in the new Carver and Make Hollow tools.

 

 

Enjoy.

[shawnolson]

I've updated Carver today with a new function and updated the documentation while at it.

[will2k]

Now I know that there is a raging hate of the Carve and Make Hollow functions in Hammer,

You dared touch the carve tool...blasphemy

 

"Make hollow" is fine but "carve" is an instant cringe

 

Not because it's a useless function, it's actually quite a nice tool to make complex shapes in a fast way. The problem is in vbsp (or hlcsg/hlbsp in GoldSrc) doing an extremely poor job in creating/dividing newly created brushes and therefore in the visleaves division, putting an unnecessary overhead on the engine.

 

Hope the carve tool in WWMT handles this issue more efficiently.

 

Props to you for constantly updating and improving WWMT.

Edited July 18, 2014 by will2k

[shawnolson]

Yeah, I rarely used either tool over the years in Hammer. And I know the stigma. But at the same time, enough people asked me for it for so long that I made it. (It is actually one of the three commercial plugins I've made that isn't directly part of WW. And it sells better than all my others... even though I think CorVex is the most invaluable of the three...)

 

I can't say that the Carve function is necessarily any better than the logic in Hammer's. In fact, I'm pretty sure it must use some of the exact same logic. What I can say is that this tool is more functional because it gives you several option on what to keep, what should be combined or not, etc. For all of my tests that go into Source, the results have been perfectly fine for VBSP. But then again, I'm mainly testing on simple scenarios like carving Box primitives into other box primitives, etc.

 

Certainly, there are reasons to not use carve functions. But I think that if you understand why they can be bad, you can also be insightful enough to know when it is fine. Among those reasons could be time and efficiency in design itself. In this case, I added the ability to carve with animations. That means you could animate a carve tool in a specific pattern and have it cut at specific intervals. Depending on the complexity, you can accomplish something far more complex in far less time if you understand how to use it.

 

In my opinion, it's just another tool. When it's the right tool, use it. Just don't try to use it when you should be using something else