Need advice on cylinders and cones

(Ifurita) #1

So I have this rather large zeppelin

It consists of 2 cones (nose and tail), a cylinder (middle body), and 4 brushes (fins)

  1. For FPS reasons, is it better to go with the aforementioned curves or to cut up and shape 3 octagonal brushes to make the body of the zeppelin?

  2. I skinned the zep with a light aluminum texture and wrote the following shader:


textures/iffy/base_flat_light //from Shaderlab
{
	qer_editorimage textures/iffy/base_flat_light.tga
	surfaceparm playerclip
	surfaceparm weaponclip
	surfaceparm metalsteps
	implicitMap -
	{
		map textures/iffy/base_flat_light.tga
	}
}

a. I don’t think surfaceparm weaponclip works. How can I make it so that weapon fire cannot pass thru the skin of the zep?
b. I’d like to make the skin of the zep slippery, so that if people step off the top walkway, the slip off. What surfaceparm could I use to get this effect.
c. I get 3 spots where the nose and the middle don’t line up - meaning you can see a good sized seam between 2 vertices.

However, when I check the 3 views, it really looks like the backmost vertices of the nose line up perfectly with the frontmost vertices of the middle. Any thoughts on how to best fix this?

(SCDS_reyalP) #2

First off, the ‘right’ way to do your zep would probably be an ASE model. Not to say that you can’t do it with patches and brushwork, just that you could get a more attractive one that way. You could export your existing work to .ase and use that as a starting point for your model.

Not sure about FPS differences of the 3 options. If you use patches and don’t use -patchmeta, distance and user settings will control how many triangles are used for the curves. If you use patches and do use -patchmeta, there is some compile setting which controls how many triangles it is turned into. If you use brushes, you get exactly what you see in the editor.

re: the verticies lining up, are you compiling with -patchmeta ? If not, you should ensure that all the patches which touch each other are members of a single func_group.
If you can’t get it to work, try making the middle cylinder, capping it, and then vertex editing the end caps.

You shouldn’t need any of the clip surfparms in the shader, it should do that by default. If it is coming out non-solid, there is some other problem.

To find out what to use to make it slippery, look at the common/slick shader. (i suspect it is surfaceparam slick)