Curves, textures etc

[ajay]

I'm making a (pseudo, obviously) curved wall in worldcraft (quake.bsp, not HL) and am making some headway in aligning the textures and making the curve as smooth as possible. I would, however, appreciate any tips mappers have re: curved structures.
Cheers.

[Lardarse]

Unless you're trying to make it look like a seamless curve (which I think it impossible), the best thing to do is to is to make it a polygon, but with the corners at strategic places. You can go for precision, but it's better if all of the corners are on integer co-ordinates (can cause problems if they're not), and sticking to a larger grid makes scaling it up or down a lot easier.

For a circle centered at 0 with radius of roughly 8n, you want to either have your corners at (8n,2n) (6n,6n) (2n,8n) and all mirrored points, or (8n,0n) (7n,4n) (4n,7n) (0n,8n). The first one usually looks better, especially for rooms and room-sized objects, as the axially-aligned sides make it look more natural (and make it easier to connect with other things if you need to). Smaller objects might look better with the second one (I'm thinking pipes with this... most mappers use a 8-sided shape for pipes, but this "rotated 12" might be better). It's also best if n isn't too large. 256 is about the upper limit for a 12-sided.

At 512 and above, 24 sided looks better. I don't remember the absolute co-ordinates for this one, but, going around the circle, the diagonals are 1:4, 2:4, 3:3, 4:2, 4:1, 4:0. I've heard mentions of 48-sided, but I don't know how serious they were...

There are other numbers of sides that can be used. 8 is popular for pipes, although they look a little too angular to me. I think there's also a 16-sided method, but I've not used it.

It's worth noting that these methods are still useable in Q3BSP, and especially useful if you're making a rotating brush (as patch curves don't give a perfect circle).

As for texture alignment on curves, I can't help you. Would like some advice on that myself...

[Chip]

Me, me! QuArK does texture alignment on multiple planes. Exactly what you need for an arch, let's say. It's as easy as selecting all the faces you need the texture aligned on, and moving them in a separate group.

Combine this with q3map2 compiling using -dust (resembling ambient occlusion) and there you have it!

I'll do a test for you and post a screenshot here.

[ajay]

This is where I've got to after an annoying 2 hours of tweaking:




Lardarse: thanks for your detailed reply - I didn't understand all of it (my problem not yours!) I'm not so precise, I do most of it 'by eye'

[Chip]

I see repetition there. A nice way of having a curved wall is applying a non even texture, with cracks or something along the whole curve.

No time yet to have an example for you, I only created the curved wall. I'll add a texture soon, could be tonight.

[ajay]

I see what you mean re: repetition, but it's less actually repetitive than it looks. I'm fairly happy with it, I may try to improve, but first I'll finish the rest of the building and see what it looks like - if it glares out to me I may spend some more time - I always like to balance frustratingly impossible attempts at perfection with feelings of success due to actually finishing something.

[Chip]

I see what you mean re: repetition, but it's less actually repetitive than it looks. I'm fairly happy with it, I may try to improve, but first I'll finish the rest of the building and see what it looks like - if it glares out to me I may spend some more time - I always like to balance frustratingly impossible attempts at perfection with feelings of success due to actually finishing something.

Totally agreed! That's why my project stalls so much. I try to improve some useless areas, instead of focusing on the big picture: having a finished mod.

[Electro]

Needs smoother lighting across the angles. Some compilers have options to adjust the angle threshold.

[ceriux]

in worldcraft pick the texture application tool, click the start of your wall ( the first sections texture) hold alt then click the next part , continue on then tweak it .

[Spike]

/me agrees with Electro.
It doesn't look smooth because the lighting suddenly changes for each segment.

[ajay]

The lighting is actually the flashlight, which tends to make things look worse....

[Lardarse]

Doing curves "by eye" is risky.

I made a spreadsheet that works out where the points on cuves should be: http://pineapple.servegame.com/circle_room.ods

It assumes that you're making a circle (although you can use just the first part to make a half or quarter circle as needed). C2 should have the number of sides for the complete circle (which would usually be a multiple of 4), and C3 is the radius of the circle. The co-ordinates it gives from row 13 downwards (the stuff in between is the mathematics involved) are relative to the centre of the circle.