Mapping Questions Megathread V6 - Developers

Have you tried a different rope texture incase the texture itself is messing up? In Hammer you should also see a multi-colored red and green line go inbetween the rope entities if you've connected them with their names properly

Changing texture worked but i still cant understand why.

I just need an advice from experienced mappers about soundscapes. I'm using hammer which is built-in Garrys Mod (located in bin folder). And soundscapes are not working. What EXACTLY i must do to make soundscapes work ?? (pls describe from a to z)

Is there a way to prevent lighting errors like this on displacements? https://i.imgur.com/VFxKVTu.jpg

As someone who is very inexperienced with using displacements, how do people usually go about with making cliffsides such as this? Ignore the TF2 assets. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/297137800359444480/425881584835624960/unknown.png

I've been looking for a way to have a transition between two frames on a texture. I want a heating metal effect - so the first frame is a grey metal and it linearly blends to a red-hot texture (frame 2). Is there any way to do this using vmt proxies? And can I trigger a transition between the two within hammer?

Using an animated texture you mean?

Essentially, but I want to know if its possible to just use two frames and blend between them rather than having a massive texture of ~30 frames.

Lighting for displacements is entirely based upon the resolution of them, so you need to use smaller more dense grids of displacements it increase the lighting detail. That being said for the geometry you are creating there you would be better served by making it either mostly solid brushes or making it a model.

Got it. It was initially a wedge-shaped brush, but someone said that displacement roads would be better for vehicles. I might end up changing all of the ramps to wedge brushes to save on brush count if I need to, though.

While a few programs have plugins or native support for a unit length that fits snugly with Source's, it's best to just work in real world units and then use a conversion factor to scale it for the desired engine. Good general practice, works for all engines. If you need a more intuitive approach, you can import some geometry from hammer to scale against.

You might be out of luck (though I'm not familiar with all of the Source shaders so maybe there is one). All the ones that I could see that dealt with multiple textures didn't seem to (obviously at least) mention supporting animated textures.

you looked into detailblendmode and the modefactor? i'm not sure how much material_modify_control can do with it.

i think Blender's unit system gets converted 1:1 to source; 1 Blender unit equals one Hammer unit? Been ages since I modeled something tho, so the scaling might be off, but there using the Blender Source Tools, I think it's pretty easy to keep scale

I've noticed that the same thing applies when you're trying to convert a model into a brush for UnrealED 2.0 (Unless you decide to mess with the multiplier in the export options, with the default value being 1).

Gaze upon my geometrical masterpiece : https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244137/90b6cb11-dd3a-48b8-abb3-71ce02a27f60/Capture d'écran 2018-03-26 17.12.10.png Wait... https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244137/d52e22a8-f9ea-4ea1-a9d2-80599a1ba0b9/Capture d'écran 2018-03-26 17.12.22.png No... https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244137/657db011-3126-4dad-9805-5ec601fdedd2/Capture d'écran 2018-03-26 17.12.44.png FUCK https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/244137/36b5c170-9878-4f4c-914c-ab2f5bf528c9/Capture d'écran 2018-03-26 17.12.55.png I've followed this tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAAIpkTU5e8 in order to make the corner of a sewage pipe, but somehow, the vertices get all fucked after a while, is there a way to correct this ? Will this look alright in game ?

As long as all connected vertices are in the same location it shouldn't be an issue. Usually this is the case, when their 1-gridsnapped. I mean, it rounds identical position values to identical grid points.

Does anyone know if CSGO has any good building textures that either of the L4D games don't already have?

well csgo has seen many old cs maps remade with brand new textures and models, so Id bet it has what you are looking for

Okay. I might pick it up later. Also, does anyone know if there's a way to get around this god-awful smoothing issue, particularly with the reflections? https://i.imgur.com/ZcpOBoL.jpg I tried messing with smoothing groups, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Either that, or I'm not applying the smoothing groups correctly.

anything with the tag "hr" on the name are newer textures made for map remakes all the textures for the new maps should be tagged with that, but in general the newest map updates were train, inferno, nuke, canals (textures are tagged "venice" in browser) and dust

There is a parameter in the vrad which controls default smoothing called -smooth with defaults to 45 degrees, meaning anything more oblique will be smoothed automatically. Ive had no luck with either method. however it seems a surefire way to enforce flatness is to have the diagonal wall be func_detail and the sides be brushes so the game cannot even try to smooth them together. Again it might just be the case that cubemaps work using a janky automatic system on the rendering level, so splitting up the exposed face there into more numerous brushes and more detailed lightmaps could make it look better as well.

How do get a func_brush to collide with everything (i.e. physics objects like grenades, rockets etc.) apart from the player? I've tried a couple things but it seems insistent on colliding with either everything or nothing.

Brushes in the same smoothing group get smoothed together. If you don't want them to smooth, make sure they're in seperate smoothing groups. You can also add -smooth 0 to prevent vrad from autosmoothing. However, you'll have to manually smooth stuff if you want it smoothed; but more often than not I find the stuff I have to smooth is way less than the stuff I have to fix.

Okay, I got the -smooth parameter working by applying it to the $light_exe command in the expert compiler, and it looks like it works pretty well. Thanks for the help.

... In all my years... That's a thing? I need to rethink my life.

Smart edit shows all of the options specified in the fgd. Not what the entity actually has. A lot of entities support commands not specified with them, such as modelscale and parent.

Is there a way to upload .raw files to the garry'smod workshop so that I don't have to abandon my map's colour correction?

It's a little sloppy, but you can force color correction on player join through LUA. The color correction options are also console CVARS, so you can set it, and the players can't override it. Sadly it's not as powerful, and I've never tested packing in .raw files into the map.

.Raw is a forbidden file for workshop, but you could just try altering the filename extension to vmt or txt and seeing if it loads it correctly (remember to alter it in the cc entity as well). I haven't tried this.