I'm just having a go at carving stuff for doors in walls. All I could find on Half-wit was the breakable glass tutorial, which, in all its methods, leaves the wall with multiple cuboid brushes.

This is probably the most noobish question ever, but I've only been at this a week, so go easy:

I take it then, that brushes can't be cut up and remain as one brush, right?

My first attempt at a single door leaves me with 7 brushes. It's just bothering me that there's all those extra polygons running through the middle of the wall that will never be seen. Is there not a more efficient method?

God forbid if I want to do something like this:

As far as i know of, thats about the only way you can do it.

yup, but there are various ways you can cut it up. I personally cut the all into 4 burshes, two either side of the door and one above. the final one that is where the door is is cut into 6 brushes, this leaves me with a total of 9 brushes, but my clipping lines are short and dont run over the whole wall.

Cheers. I was just unsure if I was doing it the right way or not.

DO NEVAR CARVE

Anything Carve can do, Clip can do better.

You might want to carve out a square section of wall, fill in the hole then carve out your door. This will localise the mess and make it look neater.

Carve is not inherently evil in itself, its just that its very easy to then mess up the resulting brushes and cause leaks, it also makes texture alignment a pain.

carve.

BSP has to be convex, so there isn't much you can do about having extra brushes.

msleeper wrote:
DO NEVAR CARVE

Anything Carve can do, Clip can do better.

If you can clip out perfect cylinders (equal sides, equal angles), you are not a human, you are a cyborg.

But yeah, if you have to carve, carve smart. Carve once, see how it cuts the brush up, and then undo and divide your brush accordingly. If you have to, divide your brush symmetrically and only carve half of it, then mirror the result.

Shmitz wrote:
If you can clip out perfect cylinders (equal sides, equal angles), you are not a human, you are a cyborg.

But yeah, if you have to carve, carve smart. Carve once, see how it cuts the brush up, and then undo and divide your brush accordingly. If you have to, divide your brush symmetrically and only carve half of it, then mirror the result.

Need to carve a cylinder? Do what I do. Create a block the same size as your door (or whatever you are making) and carve your cylinder. Then move the sinful block in front of your door, select the actual door, and clip using the carve'd brush as an example, but don't forget to be smart about it and only clip on the grid.

You guys are right, Carve in and of itself isn't evil, but when teaching newbies how to map, it's easier to tell them not to use it at all, then try to explain how to do it smart.

actually, although I tried both, I used neither for the result shown above. I used the vertex manipulation tool, since it's the closest thing to modelling in 3dsMax. Does that make me some kind of rare species of noob?

u are not alone I rarely use clip and never carve. the primitives plus vertex manipulation alone is enough to get me any shape I want. BSP doesn't like lots of adding or subtracting so I don't even clip if I can avoid it. To be honest, vbsp tries its hardest to delete all the faces you can't see and nodraws, so it doesn't matter if you end up using more blocks as long as your map doesn't leak.

Carve is good if you can optimize it properly.

Wroth wrote:
actually, although I tried both, I used neither for the result shown above. I used the vertex manipulation tool, since it's the closest thing to modelling in 3dsMax. Does that make me some kind of rare species of noob?

If you can tolerate Hammer's horrible horrible excuse for a vertex manipulation tool (undo? what's that?), you are a truly amazing man.

Shmitz wrote:
If you can tolerate Hammer's horrible horrible excuse for a vertex manipulation tool (undo? what's that?), you are a truly amazing man.

YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE

msleeper wrote:
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE
YOU CAN NOT UNDO CHANGES UNTIL YOU EXIT VERTEX MODE

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHGGGHHHHH!

So don't spend hours editing a corner and then cock it up because you drag the wrong way, or you're screwed.

Grudge wrote:
So don't spend hours editing a corner and then cock it up because you drag the wrong way, or you're screwed.

any sensible person does it in chunks, I exit vertex mode roughly every 10 points moved

Fortunately this time, I didn't need to undo. but I'll take that into consideration in future, thanks

I did it like this but its basically the same

Nicely fits in to a 128x128 gap