Is there a trick to making Radiant's cylinders more round?

(Chis) #1

I was trying to make some large cylinders and the top view looks more like a rounded square than a circle. Is there something I’m missing? How does one make big circles? like a the ring around a circular fountian…

(rgoer) #2

You basically have to just fudge the vertices around (hit the “v” key to enter vertex mode), but good luck getting a “perfect” circle. Yeah, this is something that has always pissed me off about QERadiant–and its children (grandchildren?) are no better off–why the fuck isn’t a Radiant “circle” a real circle?

(MuffinMan) #3

cylinders look rounded in game, not so good in radiant because they have to fit in the grid, which i am very thankful for as i otherwise couldn’t align things correctly. what you could do if it’s not rounded enough in game is to apply a phong shader to it

(rgoer) #4

Not so fast, MuffinMan ;^)

Make yourself a standard Radiant cylinder (you know, the squarish thing we’re bitching about) and turn that puppy into a func_rotating. You’ll immediately see exactly how un-round it looks, not only in Radiant but in-game as well.

(Irrelevant) #5

If you don’t need to bend it, make a 32-sided brush or something.

(MuffinMan) #6

as said phong shading is the key :smiley:

what i meant was that it looks more rounded in game… making the cylinders very dense would give very bad fps…

(Chis) #7

Irrelevant, Thanks, that will work for me. I never really noticed the arbitrary sided function till ytou mentioned it. I had never gone above 8 sides untill now! :slight_smile:

While, CGS subtracting one 32 sided brush from another 32-sided brush is positively evil, it does look more like a circle than thickening a cylinder.

MuffinMan, I understand that the edges are smoothed in game, but they are still smoothed in a non circle. I’m not talking small cylinders here, I’m trying for 200x200 grid unit stuff here…

(rgoer) #8

Yeah, muffinman–we’re not talking about how many subdivisions the curve patches have, we’re talking about how the curve patches aren’t circular.

(chavo_one) #9

Is this what you want?

default cylinder (square):

vertex manipulated cylinder (circle):

(rgoer) #10

Well yeah, chavo, that’s exactly what I do… but you’d think that the default “cylinder” in Radiant would be circular, and that you wouldn’t have to manipulate the vertices to get one.

(MuffinMan) #11

radiant keeps the edges within the grid, maby that’s the reason, at least i know that bevels which have the same behaviour can’t be capped correctly when you drag the vertices like that (well it is possible but manually…)

(chavo_one) #12

What’s wrong with dragging vertices? It’s the only way to get pointed arches, and cool things like that. Using default bevels and caps is only the starting point IMO. :smiley:

(SCDS_reyalP) #13

If you don’t use patchmeta, how round the cylinder looks depends on your in game settings. If you do use patchmeta, it depends on one of the compile options. How it looks in the editor has it’s own setting, which is has no effect on how it looks in game.

Nothing in q3 engine games is truely curved. It is just more or less subdivided.

You could also make your cylinder from an .ase

(rgoer) #14

Again, it’s not an issue of how smooth the rounding is, but how circular. Vertex manipulation isn’t such a big deal, I just wonder why they decided that non-circular was the way to go.

(SCDS_reyalP) #15

Ahh, now I see what you mean. Hmmm. That is a little strange.

(G0-Gerbil) #16

Only just spotted this.

The reason is a simple one - the maths used to create the curves cannot perfectly recreate a circle, or part of it.
There are more accurate mathematical means of generating curves that can reproduce circles / spheres etc, but they are much more computationally complex, and harder to manipulate in editors etc.

The curves in Q3 etc are about as fast to process as you could wish for, and as we all know, games lurve speed :slight_smile:

(rgoer) #17

Aye, and I love me some speed too. Crank as well, and I’m just coming down off a Meth high. Oxycontin, though–Rush Limbaugh was my supply guy, and that’s not lookin’ too good these days…

In any case, glad we got this cleared up–I’ll gladly sacrifice perfect circles for fps’ sake.

(Irrelevant) #18

Actually, it’s because the maths is not intended to create perfect circles.

Sure, a Bicubic Bezier Patch (Nyah!) curved correctly may create something that looks like a cylinder (or sphere), but the formulae just don’t behave like that. If you wanted something that did create mathematically correct circles, it would not use Bezier formulae.

Just make your cylinders in Milkshape or blender if you plan on bending them and rotating them around their origin. If you’re just bending them, patches should do the job. Conversely, if you’re just rotating them, a multi-sided brush should do.

(lennyballa) #19

i don’t understand that crap :stuck_out_tongue:

(G0-Gerbil) #20

Well, an analogy might be:

You have a routine that will only draw a straight line.
You want to draw a curvey line with it. Well, you can’t, you can only approximate it. Quite closely, but it’ll only ever be an approximation.

The maths behind the Q3 patches does many types of curved surfaces, but it simply can’t do a perfect circular cylinder, it can only get quite close :slight_smile: