the bblog

workshop II

I've added one or two things to test_garage in the last week or two. For one, stairs between levels! (as usual, click to enlarge)

I put doors on them, since levels 1 and 4 are open to the rest of the shop, which would funnel noise right into levels 2-3. I also modeled the outside world, which entailed cutting a hole in the side of the map, adding a skybox, and exterior brushes, which was a mild pain in the ass.

Of course, there were some brush misalignments. It looks just fine from this angle...

But move to the side a hair and...

Whoops, guess I didn't line those two up. Incidentally, this meant that the map wasn't "sealed", or completely closed off from the void, which causes vvis and vrad to error out. If vvis can't run, then the engine can't tell which parts of the map the player can see at any one place, and so renders the entire thing. Catastrophic on a big map, not so bad for something as simple as test_garage.

If vrad can't run, then radiosity isn't calculated, and the lighting isn't as nice. That's not as bad, but still ideologically impure. That isn't why the lighting in the screenshots look so bad, though; it's because I misconfigured light_environment, and ended up with the sun shining straight up at the bottom of the map.

I also forgot to add "_hdr" to the end of "ep2_outland_12a". (The skybox from EP2 I used for test_garage)

Consequently, the skybox doesn't render properly. Easy fix.

Much better.

With the skybox fixed and the sun lined up properly, the next item was to get the sun shining through the garage door, casting a nice beam, and contrasting against the cool blue garage lighting.

Criminally unimpressive! Another easy fix, crank up the power! I went from 150 to 600. (Unitless variable)

Nice. With that fixed, time to start moving to production textures. First up, grass. I also changed the exterior terrain from brushes to displacements, which render faster, and spawn texture appropriate detail props, in this case, small plants and tufts of grass.

Unfortunately, displacements are two dimensional heightmaps, which means that converting the face of a brush to a displacement converts that face, and that face only, to a displacement. Exposed to the void yet again!

Mildly complicated fix this time, I have to build some brushes to conceal the gap, and seal the void once more. Fortunately, I was planning on doing this, and didn't (notationally) waste any time patching.

Unfortunately, vbsp was still complaining about light leaks. Following the pointfile just slammed full length into the terrain displacement, which was obviously sealing the void. I mean, displacements seal the void, right?

Nope. What kind of moron doesn't know that displacements don't seal, hurf durf? Simple, but ugly, fix; I sealed off the bottom of the map with a great big nodraw textured brush butted up against the sides of the skybox. On to production texturing the interior!


Lovely.

Source file, (11 KiB rar'd .vmf) compiled executable. (443 KiB rar'd bsp) I compiled cubemaps this time, though I, for some reason, can't tell the difference. Oh well.