I’ve seen some of the work done with the Rockwork tutorial at the Sims sight with Socks tutorials. The only question I had was that I remember one of the key issues you don’t want to do is to let Brushwork Cross Paths. I thought that was a general rule for compiling and such, that you don’t cross boundaries with brushwork. In the tutorial though I see that some of the brushwork goes over each other. Maybe its just me…but I was wondering can you let brushwork cross over each other if it goes into caulking? I know this is a weird question but nonetheless I’ve been cutting brushwork in ways so that its almost always flush with other brushwork. If I was to allow some brushwork fall into caulking then it would make things a lot easier and quicker for me in mapping stuff out.
RockWall Question
but I was wondering can you let brushwork cross over each other if it goes into caulking
As long as the brushwork is made detail instead of structural it’s absolutly no problem having overlapping brushes. (thank god for that!)
For actual planes overlapping - that is, lying on exactly the same plane as each other (unless one is a detail decal) then one and one only can have a texture to avoid problems. This is true of both structural and detail (so you can have overlapping structural, but still only 1 non-caulk texture).
For intersecting planes you can do pretty much what you want. Bear in mind detail brushes won’t be chopped up at the intersecting line, so caulking the hidden faces is a must. Intersecting structural brushes WILL be chopped up to ‘fit’ to the intersection (as will a detail brush intersecting a structural brush).
Overlapping / intersecting brushes are generally avoided not because they are inherently ‘bad’ as such, but because there’s either usually a more efficient way of acheiving the same effect, or because of Z fighting (particularly noticable with 16 bit depth buffer).
Try to avoid 'em, but don’t kill yourself in doing so. Sometimes it’s the only way to acheive certain effects.