Couple of questions from a mapping noob

(Adacore) #1

Well, I’ve decided to try and get into mapping. Only started 3 days ago and spent Tuesday reading and working through tutorials before jumping right in over the last couple of days. Basically I’ve got about half the way through the basic structure of my first attempt at a map (building block rooms and corridors with caulk). I’ve hit a couple of problems:

  1. Terrain stuff - I’ve read a bit about using terrain gens and monochrome heightmaps, but how do you fit these in with your buildings and bunkers? Would it be simpler to just make the terrain brushes more basic (think supplydepot rather than radar) or should I try and look into creating more realistic looking hills/slopes etc using a gen?

  2. Having built the map out of caulk, I wondered if there was any way to quickly texture the whole thing with something visible so that I can run around it (to get an idea of the overall scale, mainly). I did this a bit early on when I didn’t have many brushes (only a hundred or so), but now I’m approaching the 1000 mark and it’d take a while to texture them all individually for testing then put them all back to caulk for ease of construction. I have a feeling I’ve just failed to spot some kind of multi-selection option that would allow me to grab all my brushes, slap a simple texture on them and compile…

As I said, I only started mapping 3 days ago so I’ll probably have a heap more questions. Many apologies if the above have already been answered in a previous post, but I tried a couple of quick searches and didn’t see anything that answered the questions, but there were so many results I could have missed it.

(zl1corvette) #2

Welcome to the wonderful world of mapping!

  1. I would create my terrain with easygen or gensurf, but thats just me, you could create it by hand as well. Both can look great, you have more control when you make it completely yourself obviously, but it takes a while. As for sticking buildings in terrain you just need to modify the terrain with vertex editing or delete the stuff around it and create new. (with vertex editing I would suggest only moving vertexs along the z-axis otherwise things can get funky)
    2)Select nothing, hit I, and pick a texture :drink:
(Adacore) #3

I was right - missed a blindingly obvious ‘select all’ function. Thanks :smiley:

(repT|Le) #4

but when you select everything with “I”, then you apply the texture all over the map, even in the unseen areas.
i also build brushwork entirely out of caulk, but then i apply textures for the visible parts. but then again im a total newb myself :wink:

(Adacore) #5

I know that - when I actually want to build a playable version of the map I’ll texture it properly, but for now I’m only wanting to be able to load it up and check that I haven’t done anything silly with the scale of things or the basic layout - I can’t be bothered to spend hours properly texturing a map for that when I’m just going to rip it all off again as soon as I’m finished.

(]UBC[ McNite) #6

I d say that the “building of caulk” is a bit overrated. Q3map2 will delete all textures of brushes when their surface will completely touch another surface, and in case you build brushes into the terrain you should place blocks of caulk all under the terrain anyway… this doesn’t leave much surfaces players can’t see that will still feature a texture imho.

(Ifurita) #7

I start out by laying down large blocks of caulk to represent entire structures or key rooms, then use that to run around my terrain to check distances, scale, and connectivity. Then, once i’m more or less happy, I build detail on top of those

(Adacore) #8

OK, I’ve hit another problem - it won’t effect me for a week or so but I can’t work out how to import models (lamps, trees, tables etc). And I really don’t feel like doing that sort of stuff myself unless I have to. I tried a misc, misc_model (not sure if that’s right, but it seemed a good thing to try) but whatever model I choose it always just gives me the following error or similar. What the hell does it mean, and how do I fix it?

vfsExtractRelativePath: C:/Games/Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory/etmain/models/mapobj/archeology/obelisk.md3
cleaned path: c:/games/wolfenstein - enemy territory/etmain/models/mapobj/archeology/obelisk.md3
Matching against c:/games/wolfenstein - enemy territory//etmain
vfsExtractRelativePath: failed
trying with a short version
vfsExtractRelativePath: C:/Games/Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory/etmain/models/mapobj/archeology/obelisk.md3
cleaned path: c:/games/wolfen~1/etmain/models/mapobj/archeo~1/obelisk.md3
Matching against c:/games/wolfenstein - enemy territory//etmain
vfsExtractRelativePath: failed
WARNING: could not extract the relative path, using full path instead
ERROR: PicoLoadModel: Failed loading model C
(nUllSkillZ) #9

If you choose a model GTKRadiant sets the whole path something like:


c:\path to ET.exe\etmain\models\mapobjects\model.md3

But the path should be relativ to the “etmain”-directory:


models\mapobjects\model.md3

So take a look in the “entity”-window and edit the value of your model path (just erase everything before “models”).

Somewhere here in the forum is some sort of bugfix.