well, my question is pretty simple.
should i make clip, ladder, nodraw and other common brushes detail or structural?
i’m not a noob and i can use the search button, i’ve already read tons of tutorials etc, but there was no answer about this or similiar problem.
thanks for reply.
Things like what you described can left structural and wont have any affect on vis what so ever only caulk will do that.
I tend to make them detail so I can filter them out with ctrl-D. Other than that pretty much everything but caulk hull brushes are detail as well.
are you sure about this? caulk is used artist to control the structure of portals but it is by mo means the only brush that will split portals. i think you might find you are creating extra portals by keeping them structural
basically anything that is not your caulk hull should be a detail brush
I tested this once i think and im pretty sure that tings that are not permanently on the map or permanently in the same spot (think about constructibles, script_movers, and doors for example) can be left structural and will not contribute to portals… i think they are made detail by the compiler…
Think about it… make a giant constructible (a gate?), leave it structural. Assume it would block your VIS there.
Then destroy it, it would still block your VIS! (As VIS is compiled and cannot be ‘decided’ in runtime afaik…)
But no it doesn’t obviously…
(as you would get a giant HOM effect when it would do that…)
I tested this with a destroyable obj (gate) and a func_door… both werer structural and both did not block vis…
If im wrong here please correct me 
EDIT
And about above statment (only caulk will block vis) this is idd not true… All brushes can block vis, as long as they are not textures with a shader that has “surfaceparm detail” (which will always make the brush detail).
So a structural brush with a rock texture will also block vis.
Well yeah thats true but hes talking about the common textures and that’s what I was referring to. You can also use the hints to force portals as well but the things he listed wont and I’ve used the prt viewer to check this in the past.
Shaders with
surfaceparm trans
are implicitly detail, unless they also contain
surfaceparm structural
See for example common/clip and common/hint in your common.shader
In some older releases of the RTCW and ET SDKs, the trans was missing from some of these shaders, but in general, there is no need to make them detail.
chris1 it seems you are right however for the not the reaon you said. it seems u think things like tanks dont create extra portals because they are turned unto entites
where AFAIK a ladder is not changed into an entity (other than worldspawn) but it does not create extra portals because of the shaderperams
it might still be better to make the brushes detail for the convinence of filltering to see the caulk hull better
See comment above about “surfaceparm trans”. Note that “splitting BSP” is not the same as “blocking vis”.