Connecting Two Rooms (advanced)

by nib

This is the followup to the basic tutorial. In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to connect the same two rooms, but without having texture overlap.

Assumptions:

I'm assuming you have gone through my "Making Your Second Room" tutorial as well as the "Connecting Rooms (basic)" tutorial and understand the basics of creating a brush and moving around. I also expect that you know how to apply textures and are familiar with the various 2D views.

Step 1:

Create your first room. I made mine 384 wide x 384 long x 192 high. Copy that room and place it next to the original so you have two rooms next to each other with enough room between them to make a hallway.



Advanced Tip: To select the entire room very quickly, use the "Select Complete Tall" feature. Simply draw a brush that is a bit bigger than the room (while in the TOP view), and click on the "Select Complete Tall" button. It will select every brush that is within the bounds of the brush you created, no matter where the brush is in relation to the Z-axis.

Step 2:

Now, draw the hallway that will connect the two rooms. For the hallway you only need to draw the ceiling, floor and two walls. Don't draw the two end pieces. Also, because the way we made the room (again, you did complete the "Making Your Second Room", right?) the floor brush will be a little bit longer than the other brushes because you want it to be flush with the floor of the two rooms.



Notice in this shot looking into the room, the wall is still complete, we haven't subtracted anything.

Step 3:

Now its time to make the hole in the wall for the hallway. This is where we deviate from the "basic" method. The trick is to create your wall with angled brushes. Its really fairly easy once you get comfortable with clipping. First, Select the entire wall brush from inside the room:



Next, size that brush so that it is flush with the hallway:



Now, we need to clip this brush at an angle running from the top right corner of the hallway to the top right corner of the room. To do this, you using the clipper. With the brush selected, press X (or go to Selection->Clipper->Toggle Clipper). Now click on the brush where you want the first clip to start (see arrow a in the screenshot), then click where you want the clip to end (see arrow b in the screenshot). The yellow part is the part of the brush that will remain, the rest of the brush will be clipped away. To clip the brush, press Enter. If, after you select the points the yellow part is on the wrong section of the brush, you can press ctrl+enter to switch which part the yellow is around. (the yellow selection piece is always made in a clockwise mannor):



Once you've clipped the wall, press ESC to clear the clipper. To create the left side of the wall, just do the following:

• Select the brush you just clipped
• Press the space bar to clone it
• Rotate the brush around the Z-axis twice by going to Selection->Rotate->Rotate Z (remember, do it twice) There is a toolbar button to do this. It is the 8th button from the left.
• Move it to the proper location on the left side of the room

Step 5:

Time to make the top piece. This is a lot easier than you might thing. You can do it all in 3 steps. You basically create the brush, then clip it twice. That's it. Well, here it is with a little more explanation

First, draw the brush the full length of the wall:



Next, clip it on the left side. Turn on clipping by pressing X, then click where arrow a points, then click where arrow b points, then press enter. Don't forget, if you click the points in the wrong order and need to reverse the selection, just press ctrl+enter.



Repeat the same thing for the right side:

Step 6:

Now, just texture it all, being sure to use ctrl+shitf+click to only texture the face and not the whole thing:

Conclusion:

So there you go! Now notice how there no overlapping textured brush faces anywhere. How important is it to use this method over the basic method? Well, that's up to you. You normally don't have z-fighting unless you are a far distance from the brush and the overlapping brush is fairly thin (less than 16 units). However, since this game uses binoculars and a sniper scope, it may be necessary to avoid the overlapping textures as much as possible. Good luck.

Thanks to Quakin' over on Quake3World. This thread is where I got most of my information.

Files:

connecting_rooms_advanced_tut.zip