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So you model entire level in Blender and basically don't use too many brushes?
Of course. I want to move away from brushes for the environment, though.motorsep wrote:You know you can turn brush work into "detail" or into func_wall and would functionally become a "model" that doesn't affect vis ?
The caulk hull can be a lot simpler than the environment, though. It only needs to follow the layout very roughly. For pure outdoor levels, you can just use a box. And brushes are very quick to place.I was pondering the idea of making levels in Blender, but it seems like a double amount of work making caulk hull afterward.
Environment modeling is challenging like all 3D art. It's true that brushes are simpler to use, but brushwork is extremely limited. A good 3D modeling suite has tools that make modeling a lot faster and more efficient compared to something like Radiant. You also get smoothing groups, vertex colours, vertex normals and so on that you can't use with brushes.Anyhow, I was just mostly wondering because I tried that and found making mesh levels to be a painfully slow process, especially that brush-made caulk hull had to be a tad smaller than the walls (or walls larger than brush-made caulk hull; especially if brushes are on the grid).
Oh, I misunderstood you. Yeah, the caulk faces shouldn't cover the lit faces of the mesh. The caulk hull is wider than the mesh.Caulk blocks light, so if these is slight precision loss, you will get artifacts on the walls (slotches, spotting, etc.) because mesh ends up slightly inside caulk wall. That's the experience I had with q3map2.
When you export your mesh from Blender to a .map format, you still have the same restrictions as with brushwork. Exporting everything to .ase gives you more creative freedom.Currently I have Doom 3 map exporter for Blender, which I would like to extend to use booleans, lights, and entities. This way level can be modeled in Blender, but exported as a map with brushes and models (can do it now, but it's not a one-click operation). Not sure if it worth turning Blender into fully featured level editor or if it's just better to use Radiant for texturing brushes, placing/linking entities, tweaking lights.