Introduction
Right, i have been seeing a lot of rather ugly looking debris lately, most of the time just one or two brushes with a single clip applied, nothing special. So in this tutorial i am going to go through how to make good looking brush debris with using the clip tool, func_detail, displacements and props
Step 1: Your Wall
Right first make a wall, I'm going to start with a low height wall, so its nothing special really, ill apply one clip to it to show what mappers are doing these days for a wrecked looking wall
Incredible isn’t it, 2 seconds work, but using my tutorial we are going to end up with something like this...
Much better, also an advantage of this method is that its great fun and very simple to do with a little bit of effort, you can get some really nice looking busted walls out of it.
Anyhoo, take your wall and select the clip tool.
Right so take your wall, select the clip tool and draw a line across your wall, then press Shift + X so both sides of your clip are white, then press enter
This should split your brush into 2 different sections, now do the same again, just go crazy with the clip tool until you have something that looks like this...
Now go crazy with deleting clipped sections so it looks all roughed up like this
What I like to do is go around the edge with the face selector and texture it with concrete/concretefloor007 texture.
Now for the most important part, select all that part of the wall and tie it (ctrl+T) to a func_detail, this should make compile times much faster than if you didn’t tie it to a func_detail (refer to zombie@computer's optimising tutorial in his sig to find out more, go on, its really good)
Step 2: Displacements
Now for this part I am assuming you are already familiar with how to use displacements, if not click here for a tutorial on displacement mapping.
Anyways, create a small displacement underneath the ground, again I use the concrete/concretefloor007 texture for it and use it to make a representation of a pile of rubble...
See, not much to this section, now its time to move along and use some models to add some finishing touches...
Step 3: Modelling Time
Right, now you have a busted wall and some displacements, but it still doesn’t look quite right, so place down a prop static and take a gander over the props_debris folder, there is a huge amount of useful models to use for a wall, mostly rebars to stick out or the walls (my personal favourite anyway).
So add a few of these around, sticking out of walls, its all about creativity this part is so it looks good, just don’t go too over the top with the models and you can have a good looking wall in no time, like this...
So there you have it, now I expect to see some good looking battered walls, no more of this half assed 1 clip brush kind of thing, I want to see rebars, displacements and fire
Happy Mapping!
Wiggle987
