A portal that shouldn't be here...

(benja) #1

Hi all ! My first message here… Usually I always find my answer here without having to post, but since i’m learning about hint and detail brushes I’m having a few problems…

For those who would like to help me you can download my .map here : http://perso.wanadoo.fr/benjaprud/benjamap.map
You can also download the .prt file : http://perso.wanadoo.fr/benjaprud/benjamap.prt

Here is the problem : This is my first testmap and I’d like to learn about optimizing with detail and hint brushes so I turned every brushes inside the walls into detail so I can see more clearly. (next step will be to add some hint brushes or turn some brushes into structural at the best place I can…) But after doing that the BSP still creates a portal in the middle of a room where everything has been turned into detail (in the allied spawn room for those who downloaded the .map file)… This is quite a problem since there is a radio in the next room and during the game when crossing this portal it turns the sound on/off… I’d really like to know how to delete that portal and why it is there…

Thanks to you all, and sorry for my english…

(SCDS_reyalP) #2

Mmm, that’s slightly odd. It’s from the wall on the other side.

It seems to be related to this:

I’m not completely sure why it would do that, although I would hazard a guess it has to do with the wall butting up on the structural textured face.

Cutting the offending brush like this:

makes the stray portal go away. Another way to deal with it would be to put a hint flush with that wall (perpendicular to the undesired portal), with skip on all the other faces. Since hint has a higher priority than normal structure, it will stop that portal from being created.

You might want to look at the ‘caulk hull’ technique of mapping, as it provides a clean way of dealing with this kind of thing. The idea is that you make all your structure out of caulk, and, and then place overlapping detail brushes for your texturing. When you have walls like this, where you want the textured areas different sizes on each side of the structural wall (as in the room that gave you problems here), you simply use a brush for each side. The radiant manual tells you to never overlap brushes, but this isn’t a problem as long as only one of the overlapping faces has a drawing shader on it.

That bit of wall would be done something like this:
Structure:

The ‘hullcaulk’ shader is exactly the same as normal caulk, but using a different name makes it easier to keep track of the overlapping layers.

detail, one side:

detail, other side:

everything:

The advantage is that your structure can be simple, and you never have to worry about the textures on the other side of the wall. It uses more brushes, but brushes are cheap. Notice that you can get less triangles on each side, because the brushes only have to be cut to reflect the texturing of that side of the wall. There should be some more detailed tutorials about this in one of the sticky threads.

(benja) #3

Thanks a lot ! Great answer ! :clap:

I’ll try what you said…