Arches

[izua]

Hey. I'm trying to create some arches in gtkRadiant, like the omnipresent ones in soylent space. I've been toying with the software (curve menu) but all I could render was a single plane curve (that also clips in a weird way). I want to make a solid instead.



I've been working with VHE for a while, for the first half-life.

[tundramagi]

Use box cylinder patchmesh, curve it.

[izua]

Yes, that's what I tried.
Whatever I do, curves can only be 'seen' from one side, if I look at them from the opposite angle they are transparent.

[Grasshopper]

hope this makes more sense . forgive my cruddy artwork.

[izua]

Done that. They are still not "solid". They are not the regular 'brush' type, which can be viewed from any direction, they can be viewed just from a single direction.

I was able to copy some stuff from the soylent map, but that didn't help me understand how to build such shapes.
There are basically two types of shapes i'm looking for. Arches, which can be viewed from any direction, and road curves. I could, of course, use a 90 degree turn in a 'road', but that's just inesthetic, now isn't it?

edit: this is what i mean by 'road'. notice how in the original map, the road 'arch' is split into 'natural' blocks and the texture flows around the curve.


I made two prisms, reduced them to a single quadrant, then ran a CSG subtract with the smaller one. This is what I got. Not even remotely close.



This is the arch problem, visible only from one side. In this case, if I'm not looking 'outside' it, it won't render (for example, if the camera inside the arch, the arch isn't rendered at all (the same thing happens inside the game). In this case, the curve is a brush made into a bevel and rotated a few times to get it on the axis i wanted.

[sev]

Curves, Bevels or Simple Patch Meshes are planes, and can only be seen from one side (except when you use shaders with "cull none").
So your arch problem isn't really one, you just have to either build a surface for every direction you can look at it, or build it based on a cylinder or a "simple patch mesh".

You may want to have a look at some tutorials:
http://www.wolfensteinx.com/surface/tutorials.html
http://www.wolfensteinx.com/surface/tut ... urves.html

[izua]

Thanks! That's what I needed. You're the guy who made treasure island, right? 'grats!