Help wanted, birds

(Loffy) #1

Hi!
I made a castle and I thought I would be nice if there where 1-2 black birds circeling over the main entrance. High up in the air, but still visible from the ground.
They dont have to flap their wings. They just hang there, on the air.
You know, like the vultures do, when they circle over a person who is lost in the desert. (Atleast in the cartoons.)
Can someone help me with this?
I guess it could be done it with an alpha texture (with the bird) and the rotate-function in its shader. Or with a brush, that moves around. Not sure how to do it though. Need some input.
Not urgent. Full credit given in ReadMe.
Thanks
// Loffy

(fidel castro) #2

fiesling from www.leveldesigner.de has written an tutorial for an Plane flying throug a map.

perhaps this can help you in starting this idea.

can be found soemwhere there:
www.level-designer.de
unter Tutorials --> RTCW

but unfortunaly its in german g
but perhaps you find a good translater :moo:

ciao
fidel

(damocles) #3

You have the right idea already. Simply make a brush that is nodrawnonsolid on all sides except the underside. On the underside put a alpha masked texture with a bird shape on it. Then sinply add an origin brush and convert to func_rotating. Add one or two copies rotating at different speeds and job’s a good’un.

(Loffy) #4

Will try it!
Thanks for the kick in the right direction.
(When I searched for bird images, one of my kids showed me the “search images”-function in Google. I had never seen that before. “Doh!”, said the kid.
Daddy is old.)
I will let you know how this bird adventure will end…
// Loffy

(Spookstah) #5

Maybe you can use this vulture prefab, i did use .obj file from another game as a base of this 3D model.
The zip contains 3 files: obj, m3d and qc file.

http://www.thelostparadise.com/files/vulture.zip

(Loffy) #6

Hi!
I folowed damocles advice. the bird hangs up there, looking really nice.
But there is one problem: it is possible to shot at the brush (and the bird). If someone fires a panzer near the bird, it will hit the invisible brush and the shot will explode. it looks really bad in the game.

Here is my shader for the texture:

textures/berserktex/birdynamnam2
{
cull none
nopicmip
surfaceparm nonsolid
surfaceparm nomarks
{
map textures/berserktex/birdynamnam2.tga
alphaFunc GE128
depthWrite
rgbGen vertex
}
}

This texture (a small bird, near the edge of the texture, with the rest of the area empty) is on one (1) side of the brush. The side facing downwards. The rest of the brush has nodraw textures applied to it.

Howcome it is possible to fire at bird, when I have surfaceparm nonsolid and nomark?

// Loffy

(damocles) #7

re you using nodraw or nodrawnonsolid for the rest of the brush?

If you are using nodrawnonsolid, then what kind of entity is it? Try using a scriptmover and making sure the solid flag is not checked - then set it rotating using the setrotation command in it’s spawn function.

(Loffy) #8

It is texture nodraw, for the sides and the top side of the brush.
Strange. that it doenst work.
I just want the shots to go thru the brush/bird. Mortars and panzers, for example, should not explode on impact as they do now. I got to get this working - or I’ll dump the bird.

Hm, scriptmover and setrotate? The entity and the script could be something like this:

Entity
key/value targetname birdbrush

Script
birdbrush
{
spawn
{
wait 1500
setrotation 0 20 0
}
}

I will try it. Thanks d!
// Loffy