So, what's the easiest way to make an arch without wanting to kill myself? :p I've been trying to make an arch with karch2tr from knave.wad for about an hour and it's been this biggest pain in the ass I've ever experienced while mapping.. 

I can send you a map that someone made (gibbie?) with a bunch of different arches at 3-sides and 6-sides. Pretty quick and easy. 

Some editors have built-in function that allow to create arches from a cube (e.g: QuArK). You just have to select the arch built-in function, and apply parameters such here: http://quark.sourceforge.net/infobase/maped.builders.archcap.html

Well, I don't know whether other editors have this kind of "prefab" features.... 

.. further details here:

http://quark.sourceforge.net/infobase/maped.builders.brusharchcap.html

enjoy :) 

That would be great. My email is in my profile.

Jpl: yeah, wc has a arch maker, but its PITA too. :p 

I always make a cylinder, fit the top to the gap for the arch, snap the vertices to their nearest grid points and then fit cubes to the outline of the cylinder :E 

I thought about doing that, actually. Will try when i get home. 

Yeah if you're going to make an arch that's just dug into a wall, the way I do it is like ZQF said: make a cylinder and cut it in half at the middle or just fit the top part at the gap, snap vertices to grid, and then with the brush I want to turn into an arch I just cut it vertically at the vertices of the cylinder and then use vertex manipulation to adjust the individual brushes to the vertices of the cylinder.

If you want an arch that is extruded from a wall and not just dug into it, it's a bit trickier. I believe WC has an arch maker, but I've never used WC so I don't know how much it differs from the one in Hammer. But if I want an arch that's gonna cover an opening that's, say, 128 units wide and with the arch gap 64 units high, I make a brush with the arch maker that's 160x160 units and with whatever values for amount of vertices and brush width that applies to the situation (usually 16 vertices/16 width), and make it cover 360 degrees. Then I just delete the lower half and place it over the gap.

At least that's about how I do it when mapping for Half-Life, never used it for Quake so it might not work there, dunno. 

Here:

http://www.quakewiki.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/c_fig07.gif

And more importantly, here:

http://www.quakewiki.net/articles/curves-for-quake-tips-and-tricks/

That top picture is how I make most curves. Just make a bunch of random cuboids usually, and use vertex manipluation to position the corners.

Useful for lining up textures: - for the angled bits - rotations of +/- 26.5 degrees and +/-63.5 degrees, stretch the texture so that it's height is 1.06 

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.wordpress.com/tutorials/

scroll way down, there is a series of images that show the making of arches. Didn't get to writing the blurbs yet, but the pics should be self explaining.

Personally I think the czg curves aren't round enough. This is just my opinion of course. 

and he doesn't really explain in his tutorial how to extrapolate for curvier curves, which is too bad. 

have you released any HL maps? 

Nope, I've mapped for years but it's mostly been disconnected experimentation with different build techniques and similar, haven't actually worked on a proper project with a release in mind.

I do, however, plan on starting on a rather large mod sometime in the future, one that I've had in the back in my head for a few years, just have to get all the different ideas concretized and in a fleshed out design document. I also want to have at least a couple released under my belt before this though, like the Q1 map I'm currently working on, to function as a "portfolio" and show that I'm somewhat capable to work on a larger project, and to help recruit other members, seeing as even the basics ideas behind the mod would need a substantial amount of coding, for instance.

Don't know how it'll work out seeing as I have little experience in working with teams, but hopefully having some proper releases under my belt will help gain interest in the project. Also I just realised I went way off topic here, but eh. 

but I'd definitely play it, I love HL. First things first though I guess - hope your map is coming along, and hope to be considered for testing if you need it - also, make sure you post shots at Qexpo! 

Yeah school's just out for summer, so I'll presume working on my map shortly and should have plenty of time. I'll let you know when it's near completion so you can test it, and I'll see what I can do regarding Qexpo. Cheers! 

Some of your shots look more like a perfect circle, but this one aint so good:

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/cylinder7.jpg

The top, bottom, left and right sides are 4 units long, but all the other sides would be much closer to 3 units long if you measure them.

I would never ever do this on purpose either:

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/cylinder10.jpg?w=500&h=400

It seems silly to divide the large face. I would just make the incision where the angle is. It would be great if you needed the textures on either side of the join to be different.

This however is a lovely circle, I have never used a 16 sided circle, I stick to 12 or 24, 90% of the time i use 12 sides, but I could adopt this method quite happily:

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/ring3.jpg?w=500&h=400

Really nice bit of brushwork that, eh. :D 

Nice polygon builder plugin, rather.

I agree that different circles have their uses. In arches specifically I like to see more than 12 sides to the hypothetical circle though. Personally. 16 work quite well there.

The cylinder you criticized was done for demonstration purposes more than anything, that's just how it came out of the polygon builder. I agree that it doesn't look so good. 16 sided circles do normally look good, but the proportions are wrong on that one. 

I know this is supposed to be an error that occurs when you have surfaces in your level with textures that are hugely stretched (over 10x)... the biggest that I have in this map is 4x though... anyone know any other causes for this? 

run bspinfo - how many vertexes and clipnodes do you have? How many marksurfaces? Anything over 65000? 

Inspect the area around the coordinates the compiler gives you and try to narrow it down to a number of brushes. It could be a back face somewhere that got stretched by accident. It seems kind of strange that a huge texture scale can cause problems (too small is another thing) - I presume this is only the case when one axis is stretched a lot while is other isn't.

If it was caused by vertexes, qbsp should have displayed a warning about the limit being exceeded.


On a completely unrelated note, can anyone check if boss2\death.wav is looped? 

to the most recent quoth .fgd? 

i've gotten this sometimes, i think, with hugely large brushes. 

brushes stretched beyond normal sized, like 999999 wide or something, usually from an editor malfunction. 

Is where its at. I've experimented some, but I'm not that good at the math and also haven't put together any type of tutorial to the effect.

The best I've seen recently was made by Rj - I trisoup double helix spiraling down as a lift shaft. It's an unreleased map and could arguably have been done with a texture, but was one of those things you see as a mapper and have to appreciate the time it must have take.

For a really good example of curve brushwork (the best I've seen personally) look at SPoG's spogsp1 for Quake2 - there's all sorts of amazing brushwork in that.

No link, sorry. 

fun fact... the dam in rub2m1 is based on a 48-sided cylinder.