Tri-Souping

(ratty redemption) #1

@sock, another great tutorial :slight_smile:

Im thinking Ill stick to making some trisouping tutorials myself, not because they are better then the sheered, square brushes you use a lot, which I know are quicker to build, but because I personally enjoy more working with triangle brushes and vertex editing.

so do you think I shouldn`t aim tutorials heavily dependant on trisouping and vertex editing at n00bs? …does anyone else have any thoughts on this?

I also dont mind at all if most mappers use socks method, as opposed to mine, but it would be cool if some people combined both.

(sock) #2

quote]
so do you think I shouldn`t aim tutorials heavily dependant on trisouping and vertex editing at n00bs? …does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
[/quote]

From personal experience I find tri-souping frustrating and a mine field for newbie style mappers. It causes cracks, splits, off grid problems, compiler errors (it use to in the old days of q1/2) and generally is very unflexible for changing. if you are planning on writing tutorials on tri-souping, remember to include a public sanity warning! :wink:

I’ve spoken to many of the GTK programmers and all of them have said that vertex editing is a nightmare and can often lead to broken or damaged brushes. Introducing newbie style mappers to this is not going to be easy and something which I don’t envy you doing.

There is certainly a serious lack of good tutorials on tri-souping out in the community and you noting down your experience on terrain building with tri-souping is something you should do as it will be helpful to others.

Sock
:moo:

(ratty redemption) #3

Thanks everyone for the kind words and I hope its easy to understand.

I like the way you draw hud info onto your radiant pics, like those blue motion style arrows, showing which way to drag the brushes or their edges.

I don`t think I would of previously thought of drawing on hud stuff other then simple arrows and the odd text, but I`m learning how to make better tutorials from studying yours :)

From personal experience I find tri-souping frustrating and a mine field for newbie style mappers. It causes cracks, splits, off grid problems, compiler errors (it use to in the old days of q1/2) and generally is very unflexible for changing. if you are planning on writing tutorials on tri-souping, remember to include a public sanity warning!

I’ve spoken to many of the GTK programmers and all of them have said that vertex editing is a nightmare and can often lead to broken or damaged brushes. Introducing newbie style mappers to this is not going to be easy and something which I don’t envy you doing.

hee hee, I think all rodent posts and tutorials should come with some kinda health warning *ratty points at Gerbil* ;)

but seriously trisouping in gtk 1.2.13 and hopefully latter versions, is a breeze compared to editing verts in qeradiant which was a nightmare.

the main advantage is we can now lock any or all of the axis, using those x y z tool buttons next to the free scaling button... in the past, I think they only locked the free scaling, but I use them all the time to make sure I only drage ents, brushes, edges or verts in the direction I want.

and if I`m editing edges or verts I always then use SnapToGrid which I have bound to key next to my DragEdges and DragVertices, which I set in a custom shortcuts.ini file in my "wolf\radiant folder"... this makes the majority of my trisouping work as effecient, realiable and quick for me as possible, so I rarely get the errors you mention above.

saying that, what is "off grid problems" ...this may be something I`m not aware of.

There is certainly a serious lack of good tutorials on tri-souping out in the community and you noting down your experience on terrain building with tri-souping is something you should do as it will be helpful to others.

cool and I`ll start on this after the weekend, although it may take a while before dime or I release anything… does anyone know if he is back yet?

also I have a q3map_alphamod request which I think would speed up the creation of alpha blending and perhaps dotproduct blending, I think ydnar might be more motivated to try it if other mappers liked the idea, so can I tell you guys about it in here? …and I can post some pics to help explain what I have in mind, if that would help?

(kat) #4

“off grid problems” usually are just vertexes not snapped to the grid, or ones that are but not snapped correctly leading to broken brushes (duplicates) cracks and splits, general borkage as per what sock mentioned above. All this is esp true of trisouping generated from a terrain mesh rather than hand made so it might be worth mentioning the distinction between the two initial ways to make the basic trisouped brush mesh if you get round to writing something up on the technique.

Quad souping has it’s merrits and now that sock has taken the time and trouble to outline the possibilites it offers it certainly adds another tool to the mappers arsenal of techniques, the thing I personally always keep in mind is that one technique is never mutually ‘exclusive’ and/or better than another, you just use what ever it takes to do what you want, so from a ‘community’ point of view it’s always best to encourage the use of all the techniques available otherwise our maps all start to look the same…!

(ratty redemption) #5

thanx and understood, and with the hand made trisouping I hardly ever get those kinda errors, in fact its usually only "artistic" errors like the alphamaps not aligning that I get, I dont even get sparklies nowadays.

so from a ‘community’ point of view it’s always best to encourage the use of all the techniques available otherwise our maps all start to look the same

makes sense, although personally Im sticking to trisouping as I enjoy building it the most ...but it is slower work then quadsouping and I dont think either method looks better then the other especially when using blended shaders, and the compiling, frame rates seem about the same.

so it really it is down to the individual mapper which method they pref, but I would recommend all mappers interested in terrain, try at least one of these hand made techniques, for one thing, they are so much more satisfying to build then using generators even if the results look similar.

incase anyone is interested, here are a couple of old pics of quad and trisouping I did using the heretic2 engine.

pic 1

pic 2

I`ve still got the source files if anyone would like to rip the caves, rocks out of them?

although the scale is slightly smaller then rtcw and I assume et, but I can now convert the tex so the .maps arent all caulk by using find replace in notepadex or radiant.

(ratty redemption) #6

@sock, thanx for seperating this and sorry for hijacking your tutorial, didn`t realize I was doing that, but having two threads makes more sense :slight_smile:

(ratty redemption) #7

apparently dime isnt going to be able to work on this any longer, due to real life commitments, so Im going to start the tutorials on my own.

I`m going to start off with some basic trisouping, then add in how I do terrain blending, showing the alphamap and dotproduct methods, basic at first, then getting more advanced.

is there any thing specific you guys would like me to try and cover in the tutorials… if there is please tell me, as it might help me arrange the tutorials, or research into an area I might not be familiar with.

also I noticed Gerbil recommending www.pcgamemods.com for uploading screen pics to, are there any other free web hosts like this that you guys recommend? …because Im running out of space on a friends site where Ive currently been uploading pics to, although I could have the .html pages on his and link to the pics somewhere else.

or should I get a domain and store my pics on the same site?

I am a n00b when it comes to web hosting so any advice is welcome.

(Ifurita) #8

If you have complete tutorials with links to graphics, I can host them on my site

(ratty redemption) #9

ok, thanx, so I`ll just prepare them on my machine, then when I have them finished, you could have a look at them and decide if your happy to host them?

it would also be helpful if someone could proof read them for me :slight_smile:

(Ifurita) #10

yep. Here’s what the rest of my tuts look like

http://planetwolfenstein.com/4newbies/mapping.htm#tutorials

(ratty redemption) #11

thanx and your Iffy yes?

are all your prefabs stored on fileplanet? I ask cus if we have sample maps and textures (not displayed on webpages) then is there an easier way to dl them, then first setting up an account with gamespy, fileplanet?

(Ifurita) #12

well, I’m hosted by gamespy, so yes, all of my prefabs are hosted on fileplanet

(ratty redemption) #13

ok, well lets see how many sample files if any, I have after the first tutorial is finished.

I guess gamespy wouldn`t want you directly linking to other dl sites from your web pages? which is fair enough I guess.

(Ifurita) #14

:wink: For small files, I can link directly off the web site which does not require an account. Larger files really should be served off the file server though.

(ratty redemption) #15

cool, because some of the sameple .pk3s could only be a few 100kb big, anyway well cross that bridge when we get to it :slight_smile:

(sock) #16

yep. Here’s what the rest of my tuts look like

http://planetwolfenstein.com/4newbies/mapping.htm#tutorials

Man you have been busy with those tutorials. Really nice work. I love the aspect of loads of pictures to describe things. :smiley:

Sock
:moo:

(ratty redemption) #17

yeah, they are good tutorials and quite varied, and the pics are clear, but on a 56k like I still have, some of the pages take ages to load with your screen size pics, although they are worth the wait… but maybe a warning on your index page would be useful?