Do keep in mind, I'm someone who had never touched mapping before. I tried looking up information on youtube, but found a tutorial that showed nothing more than making boxes. Is there a tutorial built into hammer for portal? Don't get me wrong guys, I didn't put a lot of effort in, was just saying I would have gotten further with these prefabs.

Don't bother with YouTube, it mostly contains short tutorials to do specific things, not a general mapping introduction, which is what you need.

When you have no previous mapping experience, your first stop would be Valve's developer site. Just start with the "getting started" section and work your way through the articles. Once you've got a hang of the basics, you can move on to the Portal-specific part of the site.

When mapping for Portal (or any other source game), there are many non-obvious but critical things you need to know about, like preventing map leaks, entity scripting, lighting techniques and optimisation. All of those things are explained at that website.

I agree, tutorials on YouTube, or video tutorials in general, are usually not good. This thread should provide you with links to lots of interesting reading: Mapping Tips and Useful Links
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reepblue wrote:
If you want a challenge try mapping for Left 4 Dead. Then we can talk about hard mapping. .

I haven't mapped for l4d yet because the sdk isn't out and I can't be stuffed to set up hammer, but reading valve's tutorials it looks easier.