Displacements - Blend - Sewing and minor Subdiv
Difficulty: Intermediate |
| Category: CS:S > Mapping | Author(s): Logan Dougall |
So, you want to create some great looking visuals in your map. Well displacements are definitely one of the many things that improve the quality of a map right away, unless you have no clue as to what you are doing in which case it will end up horribly wrong and no one want that.
* Small note, I hate typing out displacements all the time so I use Disp's quite a lot: P and also I have too many screenshots that I'm just linking to them*
Time to learn
Intro to Displacements and Use:
First thing you have to understand is when and when not to use displacements in your map. This is because while they do make things look cool, they do take up more resources than normal brushes. Basically you don't want the majority of your map to be made out of displacements due to the huge drop in frames that people will get and then also the inevitable flow of leaks in your map. And no one likes leaks.
But always remember that if you can use a small simple normal brush to create the exact same effect I would recommend going that route to help optimise your map in the end. For example, if it’s a small pile of debris somewhere in a corner of a room, you don't need to create a displacement if you can create a simple block and edit the vertex tool to have the same edges and shape, brushes are and always will be cheaper to render than a displacement.
Now don't just slap disp's onto anything in your map, choose them wisly. The Most obvious use of disp's would be in creating an outdoor ground terrain, which in most cases just a single flat disp with a few bumps here and there, not all that interesting sometimes but I'll still show some small little tweaks here and there to give them a slightly more realistic feel for those people who pay attention to such things of course.
Other and almost unused options for disp's is on tunnels, cliffs, garbage and debris, the latter two being the ones that take up less resources due to there size and lack of complexity. And when using displacements you also get the handy feature of getting to use the blended textures that are available or creating your own with a few simple to edit vmt's with pre-existing but not default blend able textures.
*Quick Side trip*
Creating Blend able Textures:
Blend textures are primarily used on displacement maps to create smooth transitions between two textures, e.g. grass and rock on terrain.
Creating your own blend texture is a very simple process, the first step is to choose the two textures that you want to blend together, if you're going to be using existing Half-Life 2/CSS textures the best way to choose them is probably to fire up Hammer and open the texture browser, find two textures that you want to use and take note of their names, for this example I will be using nature/rocks_red_grass and nature/grassfloor002a.
Now the first step is to create a new VMT file in your materials directory, to do this create a new .txt file and rename to something like blend_dirtgrass01.vmt. Now open up this new file in notepad and enter the following:
"WorldVertexTransition"
{
"$basetexture" "nature/rocks_red_grass"
"$basetexture2" "nature/grassfloor002a"
"%keywords" "nature"
}
As you can see, $basetexture and $basetexture2 specify which materials you want to blend together, there are other variables/parameters that you can add to this VMT file just like any other material.
So save the VMT and open up Hammer, type in your keyword or the name of the texture and your new blend texture will be there ready to use on your displacement maps. Enjoy! :)Just don't try to blend two textures that would obviously not go together, ie the combine metal and wood would not look good blended together.
Creating Displacements:
Now hopefully if your interested in creating displacements you already know most of the terminology for the Hammer editor and how to move around it's program with relative ease so here goes,
for a normal ground disp >>
1. Create a normal Block in whatever size you want but it is recommended to stay within numbers that are a power of 2 so they are easier to work with imo. The block that I created is just a small piece thats 256*512, they can be as big as you want, just be aware that you do not need one giant disp to cover your entire map, you can piece them together as I will show in this example.
2. With your block UNselected ,Go over to your tools on the left sidebar select the application tool button. Now using the 3D view and keeping the application tool window open, select the top face of your block that you want to be turned into a displacement, it should turn a transparent shade of red with the rest of the block looking like the normal texture. Now that you have this side selected, click on the displacements tab in the Application Tool window.
3. Time to create that displacement. Click on the ol Create button and using the arrows to select a power to create the disp in. The range is from 2 to 4, not all that large of a range but remember, they are more expensive to render so if it did go any higher it would not be that useful. The higher the power the more points on the face that become editable so its up to you to decided just how much detail that displacement will need. For this example I'm just going to use 3.
4. There are two options here, you can edit the points yourself right away by using the "Paint Geometry" button or you can click on the "Noise" button to create some random bumps by entering in the min and maximum you want the points to move by. I'm going to go with 0 and 25.
5. As of this point you now have a perfectly good bumpy ground. But to make it fit to your liking you can select the Paint Geometry button and change the elevation of any point to where you want it. You can further change how your editing the points too by selecting the different axis and then have them move in only that axis by right or left clicking with your mouse on the point/points. What I would recommend is that you don't move points just by themselves because you may inadvertently create really deep cracks that people can get stuck in without even seeing it in the hammer view. To select more than one point at once you can change the radius of the editing tool and also the distance the point will move for each click. I'm just going to quickly change the radius to 75 and keep the same distance and make this more of a ramp going upwards in one direction while keeping the same randomness created by the noise button, which you can reuse again if its beginning to look flat again.
6. Now onto using some of those blending Textures that I mentioned, which are almost a must for displacements because they are just amazing eye candy and easier to use than overlays which can get messy. Without leaving the displacements screen, select the button called "Paint Alpha". in this new window you'll see some options that you can change, the ones you'll probably use are the brush size option and the value option for how visible the different texture is when you apply it, click several times on a point to make them more visible and only once or twice at the point where you want to transition between he two textures. It’s all personal preference at this point on how you want things to look. I just quickly went right up the middle of my ramp here and used the blended gravel/rock texture to make a path.
Sewing Displacements:
While this is a completed Displacement it does very little good on its own most of the time. so I'm going to quickly explain some rules etc about sewing displacements together so that there are no errors.
You can only sew displacements along the connecting edges of their original block shapes. Trying to eyeball the two displacements in question to line up will not work. the original boxes for the displacement are still visible so use them
The edges in question that are getting sewed must be the same length or can be 1/2 of the larger one but must be touching at a corner.
When sewing things together it is recommended to go back and do some touch ups with the Paint Alpha button along the seam so that a visible border is not there.
Now that you know some basic rules about sewing,
Detailed Cliffs:
With the same technique as making cliffs you can make tunnels the same way that look more realistic.
This one will be a bit quicker to read as I'm not going to list off all the same steps as in the first example.
1. Create two blocks the same way you did for the ground but have one of them be vertical, as this one will be the cliff face and the horizontal one your cliff top. The important thing here is that when you put these two blocks together they have to have the faces that are going to be displacements actually touching each other, so your blocks will be inside one another.
2. Using the same knowledge from creating the ground, select both faces and create a displacement, once again the power you use is up to you but both must be the same or they will not sew correctly.
3. Add in some noise this time, I went with -10 and 30, then just quickly sew them together so that they are connected again.
4. Now using the Paint Geometry button again you can edit the top side of your cliff because to edit the side would only raise the points upwards or downwards. To "pop out" the side of your cliff you’re going to need to change the axis that you’re using. Depending on the direction its facing it will either be the X or Y axis and once again, depending on what direction it’s in the right and left mouse buttons will move the points in or out. Right now your two edges are on a straight line which you probably don't want there. So using the Subdivide button will round out that corner for you before you go onto editing the points yourself.
An example of a completed map with this type of cliffs in it can be seen in Here,
*Map Created by Nipper - DE_HIGHHOUSE
You can use blended textures again for cliffs/tunnels if you like, they are available and quite handy.
Also, if your interested in a specific tutorial on making tunnels with displacements then download this PDF file Here Note that the PDF tutorial was not written by me, I'm just linking you to the file. I don't know who created it.
Updates can be made upon request.
Lost, |
| Added: 2 years ago | Tags: displacements, blend, sewing, minor, subdiv |
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