General Half-Life 2/Architecture
description
Using the Torus tool you can create rounded pipes from brushes, also explains how to optimise them.
keywords
rounded pipes, round, pipes, curved, torus tool, torus, tool, brushes, brush, pipe.
Thankfully models aren’t the only way to have curved pipes in your map, they can now be made with world brushes. This is useful if the models don’t fit the bill, which they rarely do.
A few things to bare in mind, Source isn’t keen on world brushes so when we make the curves you must remember to make the whole thing covered in the nodraw texture and then texture the outside with your chosen texture. Also make the pipe a func_detail. These few steps halved the filesize of a .bsp with the pipe as all world brushes.
The first thing to do is to create two cylinders to connect, they need to be at right angles and also an equal amount of squares in distance apart. This helps stop errors and makes the pipes look neater.
Now select the Torus tool from the primitives menu and drag a box from the outside edge of each pipe so that it performs a perfect square like the below:
When you hit Enter it will bring up a menu like the below:
There are two sections, the top part is the front view of the pipe and the bottom box is the top.
Cross-Section Settings
Wall Width: Set this to a fairly low number, the pipe will work better if there is a slight hole in the center, it doesn’t matter how big as the inside will have nodraw on it so it won’t cost you any resources.
Number of Sides: Match this to the number of sides on your main pipe.
Arc: Make this 360
Start Angle: This is fine as 0
Cross section radius: Now this is how we determine the width of the pipe bend to match the main pipe. If you look at my pipe in the image you can see it is 4 grid squares wide, so you need to make this value 8 as it halves it. If the pipe was 2 grid squares then the value would be 4 and so on.
Rotation sides: This is how smooth you want your pipe bend to be. Remember that if it’s a small curve then lower sides are needed as it will look out of shape and most probably have errors. For larger bends feel free to up the amount a bit to provide some smoothness.
Rotation Arc: Normally 90 for pipe bends but you can use 180 for big curves or just use two 90-degree pipe bends.
Rotation Start Angle and height can be left as 0
Once you have done this hit OK and it will create the bend. You will notice that it seems to be squashed flat. There is no way to stop this as far as I know but dragging and stretching the pipe up into position works fine in all the pipes I have made.
So there you have the newly created pipe:
If you created it using nodraw texture then you can now just texture the outside, if you didn’t (like me) then just choose the nodraw texture now and select the pipe bend, then use the apply texture to all faces tool and texture the outside like so:
Again make sure you func_detail the brush as well and you should be good to go
(If you make the centre of the pipe large enough you can also adapt this method to creating pipes that you can walk in, like sewers for example)
Related:
Example Map
Blink
