Wiky's Build Clean Tutorial

Lithtech Jupiter engine

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Wiky's Build Clean Tutorial

Post by Spawn » Mon Dec 17, 2018 10:47 pm

A little background on building cleanly.

Download: Clean.ltc

If you read the first section on building in DEdit for NOLF2, you will see a section on building cleanly.



IMPORTANT READ:


For the most part building cleanly is a good habit to get into. In the professional maps, there are many instances of a professional level designer NOT building cleanly. This is why I would recommend NOT going overboard with clean building. You can spend ages making sure all vertices touch other vertices.

Advantages to building cleanly:

[*] Most importantly building cleanly takes care of those nasty sparklies! If you have a big brush, say a square 256 x 256 or bigger, the processor will break it up into smaller triangles. This often causes sparkly lines to appear in random areas of the map where you know that you didnt split the brush up.

[*] Huge advantage to lighting. Getting a weird lighting effect? Make sure you are lightmaped first and formost, secondly if its a big brush (say 256 x 256 or bigger) split it into either 2 or 4 triangles.

[*] May have a positive effect on frame-rate?



Disadvantages:

[*] Time Consuming

[*] Misaligned textures

[*] Overlapping brushes (by accident)

A quote on clean building from the documents included with Jupiter:

"If a vertex sits against an edge instead of another vertex, it creates what is called a t-junction and while the level processes, it will try to fix these on its own. It is better to build clean and avoid making the processor make the decisions on how to cut up the geometry for you. You will also get better lighting results if you build clean."

All that means is avoid T junctions. See the below illustration.

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1. Start with two single sided polygons (squares.)

Grid: 64

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2. Split the top polygon by selecting it, dragging a line across it, and hitting 's'

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3. You are left with 3 polygons now.

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4. Hit Ctrl + G to go into geometry editing mode. Mouse over the top left vertex on the top right polygon and hold down 'M' on the keyboard. Move your mouse to the right vertex. When you move a vertex on top of another vertex, there are still two vertices there. (They are just on top of each other.)

You can mouse over one of the extra vertices and hit delete to create a triangle. Also if you have multiple polygons selected and you want to move multiple vertices, hold 'b' instead of 'm'.

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5. Alright! The Next step is to hit ctrl+B to enter brush mode, select the other square and then hit ctrl + g to go back into geometry mode and drag the top right vertex over to meet with the triangle.

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6. Enter brush editing mode (ctrl + B) and select both polygons.

Hit shift + J to join the two polygons into one brush.

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7. Now add another single sided polygon on top. When you add single sided polygons, use geometry mode to make them. Building in Geometry mode allows you to make polygons that aren't fully 3d brushes. This will save loads of time, since you wont have to go back and delete 5 of the hidden (unseen) faces.

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8. Add a regular brush (brush mode Crtl + B.)


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9. add a 8 sided cylinder smack in the middle of our top polygon.


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10. Cut the top polygon just under the cylinder.

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11. Select the top poly and cut it along the top edge of the cylinder.

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12. Cut the two side polygons leaving a square in the middle under the cylinder. Delete this square poly.

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13. Dedit creates a cylinder with some vertices that are off the grid. We must manually go in and snap the cylinder vertices to the 16 grid so that we can butt other brushes up to it without having a gap.

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14. Select the bottom polygon and in geometry mode make it into a triangle. You can mouse over one of the top vertices and hit delete to remove it, or simply drag them both to the same point.

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15. Do the same with the top poly and then the side polygons.

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16. Most of your true building should be in geometry mode. Here I drag the vertices out to meet the top polygon.

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17. Create two custom polygons in geometry mode to fill the gap. Join them. (shift +J)

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18. Ctrl +C = copy. Line up the marker by placing it exactly in the top left of where the new brushes will go.. Ctrl+v to paste. From the menu at the top select: selection -> mirror -> left to right. This should pop your brushes into the gap exactly (as long as you set the marker up properly.)

You can also use right click to copy and paste since it is faster.

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19. Select both bottom custom gap brushes, copy them, line up the marker, and paste. What you have is an upside down copy of your bottom 4 gap filler brushes. From the menu at the top again choose: selection: mirror : then front to back.

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20. BAM! A clean built floor with a cylinder in the middle! a thing of beauty isn't it?

Join your floor together.

You can avoid clean building this floor altogether by placing the cylinder 1 unit off the floor. As long as the cylinder doesn't touch the floor, the processor wont break up the floor into separate polygons (unless its really big, then the processor will break it up anyway.)

The disadvantage to putting the cylinder 1 unit off the floor is that sometimes light will leak under it and reveal your trick.

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21. Under your cylinder, select it, go into geometry mode and page down on the bottom face. It is unseen and not needed.

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22. A finished work of art! Don't you feel better knowing that you are building cleanly?

Cleanliness is Godliness!

(Reposted from Nicepurchase.com/nolf
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