Pipes

(Dark Killer) #1

how do you make those nice round pipes that lie on the terrain like seen in railgun when you go from the axis spawn to ammo depot or w/e it is! I tried doing the cylinder but i cant make it look normal, its not round and the textures are messed up but i know how to fix the textures but it still looks pretty weird! :???:

(Thej) #2

try using cylinders under the curves button.

U can texture them as a normal brush, but instead of using s for the surface inspector, u use shift+s

(Theisy) #3

Cylinders never look right on Radiant but ET makes them round

(ziege) #4

Thanks Theisy :smiley: I’d avoided using pipes and handrails since they just looked square in Radiant, didn’t even think of compiling to see what they look like in game until you said that.

Wee I can feel my mapping skills increasing as I type :slight_smile: Watch out Drakir!

(Auriel) #5

on that subject, how do i make the pipes ‘hug’ the terrain?

(Dark Killer) #6

hmm but when I make a cylinder its only textured from one side and my texture still appears to be stretched what happened?

(Thej) #7

press Shift+s and then natural, that should fix it.

U can also thicken the pipe with thicken, also under the curve button

(damocles) #8

2 things…

  1. Only use thicken on a cylinder in special cases. Say for instance you wanted to make a sewer pipe that you could see the opening to. You would need to use thicken then. But for pipes that you will only ever see one side of, use regular cylinders. Curve meshes use up a lot of polys, so using thicken would be a total waste of polys if you don’t need to.
    If you want to make it bigger, just expand it like you would a regular brush.

  2. To make them “hug” the terrain, simply select the cylinder and press v to enter vertex editing mode. I would recommend making a selection drag box to grab a line of vertexes at once (selecting from the side of the cylinder) - this way you can move the center or ends of the cylinder at once and not malform the tube shape, only bend it to hug the terrain.

Pipes are great once you learn the techniques to controlling them and not wasting too many polys on unnecessary details. If it’s a straight pipe, consider using low poly normal cylinder brushes (not curve patches) and then use phong shading to make it appear smooth.