Map detailing and Milkshape 3D blog - Vosla

A noobs point of view on map detailing.

I had run in a roadblock several times with my level editing regarding detailing a few times.

You can do pretty detailed brush work with the Half-Life Engine but the smallest unit is around one inch or so. On more than one occasion, I wanted greater detail with props and made a pitstop at using sprites which are completely useless if you are able to change your viewing angle much around them as they stay in one axis to your view - except for the Z axis. Remember the trees in "They Hunger" mod? So I went back to brush models with 5 sides invisible and one visible with alpha blend. Good for small props like a clock on a fireplace ledge. Such props are more then sufficient for maps which have faster action or much space to explore. Look at "Natural Selection" mod for a perfect use of such brushes.

One of the many reasons you have never seen maps made by me and probably never will is the fact that I want too much details. I know that it is just bad planning as I am a fun mapper and give little thought to proper planning. And my level tend to have slow pace so people have time to look at things - which reveals such things like bad texture placement, bad lighting and ugly brush models. I wanted details, so I started looking for real models, changing their texture to fit my needs. But it felt cheap to use them. I surely don't need to remodel simple furniture - there are plenty of chairs out there... I want my own models. So I went for the swiss knife of Half-Life modelling: Milkshape 3D. Bought a license (it's bloody cheap! And shareware to try at first), had a download and three days later I had my own "bodyshop" to chop up some stuff. Thanks for some nice tutorials out there, I had my first model built vertice by vertice, face for face and textured in roughly an hour. It's an CD case (yes, I could have just made a box and resize it, I know!) and in the game it's the size of a pizza box... a BIG pizza box. ;-)

The point is with this blog entry that fun mappers should give it a try to make some models or at least use fitting prop models in their maps. My gaming alter ego traversed dozens of cafeteria levels and most of them looked like some CSI team had been there and took everything back to their labs. "Realistic" cafeterias had some rubbish on the floor, coffe mugs on the tables, plates, some food and maybe some overturned tables or chairs. You see good and bad examples in the original Half-Life maps.