Blogs - Angry_Beaver

The article intended for this week has been postponed due to technical issues, not that any of you knew what it should be, but vague hints must be extended to imply future dates instead. And anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about just smile and nod as I’m going to move onto some of the fundamentals of Texture Alignment.

So the first thing to address is why bother, why should texture alignment even be an issue. You’ve got the texture right and you’ve got it on the wall so you’re done, wrong. Proper texture alignment really is nothing more than a detail and polished but it’s the kind of detail and polish that makes the difference to a finished product. Let me show you a room made by someone who doesn’t do any texture alignment compared to someone who does everything needed. As seen below the difference in spending the 15 second to align the textures makes a world of difference. The area still looks low quality but that’s just due to lack of detail what’s there looks infinitely better and that’s why you should spend time aligning textures.
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So there are some essential things when it comes to texture alignment, and pretty much every single last one is found in the Face Edit Panel, (The multi colored cube on the left, the one you really should know by now). Realistically their all self explanatory fit, stretches a texture to fit, L makes the textures left edge align to the edge of the brush, rotation rotates the texture. It all applies to texture alignment. The only tool valve is hiding form you is one of the best. Alt + Right Click. When you have a face selected Right clicking will apply all its attributes, when holding down Alt it will apply all the attributes and also align the texture so that it matches up with the other texture to looks seamless. In the previous picture you can see how the texture looks continuous round the corner, that’s what the Alt + Right Click did. As you can see a valuable time saver to align textures, the only drawback it has is that it creates a custom texture projection direction.

Now the term “Texture Projection direction” Is probably one most people haven’t heard of and when they figure out what I’m talking about they’ll probably realize they didn’t know what to call it before then. There are 2 default projections, World and Face. The world projection means that the texture is lined up in the X Y or Z axis and then just put onto the face. Think about it like a projector. If both are lined up neatly you get a nice square; however, if you slope the screen then the image looks stretched. The same thing happens to the textures in Hammer, it even goes so far as projecting on the back of the screen sometimes. The Face projection ALWAYS aligns the projector and screen up properly. So no matter what way you rotate the screen it’s projected from the right angle, so text is never backwards and the image is never stretched. To World is useful when you wish to keep things lined up, for example a concrete floor that has several rises and falls that needs to look continuous. When aligning toFace the slight slopes in the edges would show up as the textures slowly become misaligned. But a toWorld projection means that while they are technically stretched that they will still line up. Displacements take the base projection of a face then map a vertex onto that layout. So you should always align your faces properly before displacing them. Below is an example picture of what the difference is between toWorld and toFace.
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So really let’s address the biggest point of texture alignment, and that’s what we’re aligning it to. Alignment is all about the edge of the brush and the transition to the next brush/face/texture. A texture with no discernable edges or details cannot really be aligned because doing so serves no purpose; however, add an adjacent face with the same texture and they should be aligned to each other for appearances sake. When a texture has a trim for the top and bottom, align the bottom of the texture to the floor and the top to the wall. If the rooms too high then use a version without trim or make the wall out of several brushes for each section of trim with top/middle/bottom textures. If you’re using a tile on the floor, align it so the tiles line up with the walls. If you have a metal edge around something pick a metal that has a pronounced ridge and align that all the way round the edge. Take the time and make sure that the edges of the texture make sense with what you’re aligning them to, don’t simply slap on a texture and call it done. There will be more specifics on alignment in the higher classes of texture alignment. Class dismissed.

This Week I’ve got absolutely nothing of interest or irrelevance to say beyond the blog itself so lets get down the fine art of breaking things.

Firstly we’ll deal with the most common type of destroyed objects, pre broken environments. They were like that when you got there, honest. Now there’s several ways to achieve a pre broken environment with Brushwork, Models, Displacements and various other smaller effects.

The oldest version of broken objects comes from brushwork; this used to be done back in the GoldSource days and is usually used by those who don’t know any better. The results often take more work than should be needed and look sub par in today’s graphics world; however there are a few times when it’s required.

With the appearance of source models became a much bigger part of broken environments, models themselves were allowed to break and shatter creating interesting and detail destruction of props, also props like broken walls existed with a perfect premade hole, so long as the texture matched what you were making. While speeding the process up dramatically the problem with the models became their appropriateness as often you would have to design the scene around the model and make it fit so you don’t have problems. This and the prefabricated look of the models is why I put all my weight behind Displacements as the way to do destroyed environments.

In order to displacements you first build the brushwork to mark the hole, and then establish the quadrilaterals you need to displace and displace. The fine adjust displacements allow will let you create and interesting broken edge to any shape and any texture you desire. Now Displacements aren’t without their problems Displacements have a nasty tendency to light annoyingly or incorrectly. Displacements smooth light and light from the vertices as I’ve mentioned before, this leaves them with an annoying tendency to pick up stray pieces of light and amplify the effect or to have smooth corners on what should be a harsh edge. To deal with the stray pieces of light a block light brush near the vertex can work wonders, to deal with smoothing problems you need to break the brush into multiple brushes and then adjust them a micron. To do that, hold down Alt to turn of grid snapping and scale the brush a tiny bit. The tiny bit will be enough to break the smoothing but not enough to visible show. If you are worried about it showing then you can always paint geometry on the vertex pulling it left and right and the other vertex will settle to a near identical position due to the way the soft edge works on paint geometry.

The last thing to help show broken objects is several minor effects. Things like decals have some concrete or plaster damage then can help out, overlays which show cracks can help when brushwork would be too much, dust and dirt in the area can add to the atmosphere of debris, and even having broken popes vent steam or drip water, broken electronics spark. The little touches to the already broken can go a long way to finishing the effect. Below is a picture of exactly how I employed displacements and a few other things to make a broken environment.
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I’d of loved to of talked about dynamic breaking and letting a player see it but that’s useless without some form of animated video showing how it happens. Who knows what I’ll have for next week.

Last week was a long weekend, this and other factors has reminded my friends I’m very commitment free, and a friend with few commitments it always the guy you phone up to hang out with. That and general sloth made me think Monday was Sunday and before I realized what was going I’d blown last weeks deadline so hard that . But I digress, this week I’m going to be discussing lighting with source or more specifically light maps.

Like with anything technical words eventually spring up to define complex ideas and turn them into manageable ideas so I’m going to introduce you to the luxel. A luxel is at its heart a pixel of lighting information, I’m not sure where the U comes from but I think a luxel sounds better than a lixel. We all know pixels are colored and arranged and put together to form an image, higher resolutions means more definition and clearer boo… pictures, the same applies to luxels. Source has what it calls “light maps” these represent the luxels on a given surface; the light map grid controls the size of the luxel in units. One luxel is by default 16 units square. There are advantages to certain properties of a light map.

Adjusting your luxel size does a few things so to save complex sentences.
Luxel size – Down
File Size – Up
Compile Time – Up
Texture Memory – Up
FPS – N/A
Looks – Up
And vice versa, increasing your light map size has its drawbacks, and from that it’s best to work a bit of give and take. For anywhere you increase the light map you’re probably best decreasing it somewhere else otherwise your VRAD is going to take forever to make a gigantic map files that only people with lots of memory can play without fps issues (using too much texture memory on computers with low RAM will slow them down); however, the change in quality is apparent below.
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There’s only 2 relevant tools for adjusting light maps, the first the light map grid size in the top right of the face edit dialog. The other is the light map grid 3D view. The basic rules I use for light map optimization goes that any face that doesn’t receive light (no draw, trigger, etc) gets a light map of 1024, so it’s easy to identify. Then every other visible face gets a light map of 32. This means the entire map is usually a bit smaller and a bit faster to compile and that I can usually increase light maps at need in the rest of the level. Anything that gets indirect lighting but is still relatively close to a light like the floor or ceiling above a light gets a light map of 16. Anything that has an obvious shape of light or has light directly cast on it form a short distance gets a value of 8. This usually keeps things clean looking and retains the form of the light. Then anything lower is only ever set from the need for a more defined shadow or wanting to have a shape to it. I’m sure you’ve all seen Raminator’s excellent work with low light map scales in Blast pit.

Lastly I’ll leave you with an example of some light map optimization I’ve talked about before with pictures as practical examples are often best. In the picture below one side shows the in-game compiled version and the other side shows the light maps as displayed in Hammer. The light map view is easy to access: left click on the word Camera in the top left of your 3D view, and from the drop down select 3D Light map Grid. In this view, yellow faces have smaller than default scales, white faces are at the default and blue are larger. The hallway we are looking at has wall mounted lights and a few ceiling lights as well. In the picture it's clear to see where the light map scale has been increased and decreased. The front of the pillar has an increased light map because of the light source on its face, to catch all the detail. This is not such a major problem as the pillar is a small thin face and the only area with a lower scale. The floor and a few of the walls along the edge have been scaled up, as looking at the in-game rendering little to no detail or change is seen in the light map; they are excellent candidates, the floor especially so with its large size. The other faces have been left at the default resolution as they all have some play of shadows or changes in brightness. While not detailed or essential enough to warrant a smaller scale, increasing the scale would only serve to create poor looking lighting as the lack of detail would show.
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Apologies for the lack of original content to this blog; however, I believe some blog is better than no blog and I would not like to disappoint twice in a row.

Firstly a big hello to ModDB, I’ve recently taken up an account there and will be duplicating my “The Dam” articles over on my personal blog there. This is firstly for my own personal sense of exposure and also to give the blogs somewhere to go when we faithfully release BM, and please, don’t try to construe the fact that BM is close to release from this. I signed up as a way to help team members deal with a spam problem I won’t go into and duplicating the blog seemed prudent, you’ll know when the mod is close to release. I intend to duplicate over my backlog of blogs from the Black Mesa Dev blog when it seems appropriate, but onto the controversial topic at hand, Eltism in the development scene.

The first thing at hand is to deal with your doubts that it exists in the first place and trust me its there. I won’t use names because then I’ll be insulting some scene’s and praising others before I tear them down to so I’m not going to name names, but there are websites that carry reputations. On more professional websites they’ve even been used as insults “Man tell that guy to go back to XXXXX”, “At YYYYY we expect high quality stuff, if your posting this you’d be best of at ZZZZZ”, or even “----ing AAAAA n00bs”. I’ve seen these in chats rooms and I’ve seen them in forum posts. There’s a general attitude that’s reached by those with skill that they don’t have time for those without and I’m here to call everyone one of you out and say shove it up your ---.

The great John Gabriel’s internet equation goes that
Normal People + Anonymity + an Audience = Total retard
However, this fails to take into account one major factor that modders love to swing around, their E-Rooster (k, follow? puns trying to keep it family friendly). With their E-Rooster at stake every person likes to prove how totally frigging awesome his Rooster is and this leads to an on going competition with no end in sight and no real score board to brag with. With no clear top dog there develops cliques of those who by measure of their rooster are better than everyone else, and thus starts the problem. Those who consider themselves better have 2 ways of dealing with it
1 – By building people up, offering help and advice to get the people where they need to be so that the entire community as a whole profits from better developed mods and extra content.
2 – Ridiculing those who don’t match you standards and directing them to the clique you think they belong to and relegating them there while constantly pointing out which clique you’re in.
So what do these Cliques resolve to in our modern world? Mainly it ends up being the websites I mentioned earlier. Being a part of a website or a community sets you inside that Clique of people and all the expectations thereof.

Now to a degree this is human nature, people love to be in charge and on top, but there are the 2 ways I mentioned to do that, the type 1’s and the type 2’s. What this blog is, is nothing more than a challenge to every single last 2’s who care about their rooster like it’s the only thing, to try being 1’s who build their community. Now people will argue it’s always been that way and it won’t ever change and I bring you to a lesson of history.

Anyone who did modding back in the days of things like GoldSource knew websites for prefabs/models, friends who would do them favors, mutual content swapping, and availability was rampant, this was a community of 1’s, people that shared their skill and advice and made it available for all. Nowadays most content websites are dead or cost you money, there’s no longer that willingness to share and there’s a desperate cling to your content and your content alone to deny others form having it because it’s your content. This no longer sounds like 1’s, it’s nothing but 2’s with the dream of breaking into the industry while viewing everyone as competition rather than an ally.

We all have things to share and learn, all I want to say is those so desperate to prove how much better they are than everyone need to stop and help others else they ruin it for everyone else, people should not be ridiculed or put down because they aren’t as good as you, instead you should show them what your doing that makes your work better so they can make better work too, that’s a far better example than a screenshot that looks like it should be from a professional studio.