 News | Forum | People | FAQ | Links | Search | Register |
Log in |
|
|
Mappers tend to stick perpendicular to the grid on the x/y axis. It's easy... Quake textures tend to be nice and modular when working like that (also, faster vis). Base maps tend to use more angles usually, for some reason. Would be cool to see more maps where the rooms aren't boxes though, helps make things seem otherworldly, since boxes are like the constant in architecture.
Also, rotating entire rooms or buildings so the horizon is titled, can give player a feeling of disorientation/unbalances. Takes bit more work in bsp engine since need to keep things on grid. Just a basic assumption that isn't questioned often enough I think. Doom does it more, because it's more 2D and have less options for variation besides just making the sectors irregular shaped. I rotated a tower around the z axis and it took most of a day to get it looking right and aligned to the grid. You can kind of see it, lower center, in this screen shot.
http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/wish13_a.jpg Pain in the ass it was, especially the arched doorway you can't see :) But at least you can align textures fairly well. The problem with going too far off straight vertical is that the texture alignment gets pretty ugly looking and not really fixable as a surface approaches 45 degrees tilt off vertical and is angled in the xy plane at the same time. A lot of the textures are just cut and paste, highly modified versions of the standard id textures.
The stone textures are modified versions of the zstn3 set (I think) from Kell's Apocrypha wad. The brick textures are based on a couple of full color jpgs from a site called Spiral Graphics. I had to modify them a lot to work in Quake, and I created nearly two dozen unique variations just for this map. (Just in case, BTW), I wasn't disagreeing with you or anything, as a matter of fact I pretty much agree 100%, I was just trying to point out that Quake is pretty unfriendly with regard to texture alignment when it comes to oddball brush orientation.
I actually went to a lot of trouble rotating that tower and even though the effect is subtle, I like it a lot. You need to use an editor with proper texture locking. Build it on axis and then rotate it later. Should save you a lot of pain...
The problem with funky rotations was older compilers which lacked support for floating point rotation of textures, or not being consistent with editors when to switch between projection planes when dealing with 45 degree surfaces.
Quake itself has no issues as long as the information in the while, some/many of the old compilers would flip rotations or planes or both, that's not exactly what I see.
As far as I can tell, it (Quake) always seems to project directly on axis (90 degree angles), never at 45 degree angles or anything else for that matter. When a surface is exactly vertical, simple scaling will usually fix any horizontal texture distortion, but once the surface is tilted 45 degrees away from vertical it becomes hopeless. The texture projection is entirely up to the compiler. If you feed a standard map file to a modern compiler, it will however use the paraxial texture projection which you are seeing.
If you want more control over texture projection, you will need to use an editor that writes and supports Valve's 220 map file format, which basically allows you to set up the texture projection in whichever way you like. TB doesn't support this yet, but it's planned for TB 2.0 (I think you are using TB?). OTOH, there are many examples of Quake maps with paraxial texture projection which have proper texture alignment on rotated objects, but it's tricky.
|
|
| You must be logged in to post in this thread. |
|
| Website copyright © 2002-2024 John Fitzgibbons. All posts are copyright their respective authors. |