General Half-Life 2/Architecture
description
Detailed look at the best methods to creating a simple set of stairs.
keywords
stair, stairs.
First and foremost, this isn't the definitive guide to every staircase you're ever going to need, it's a good way to make stairs that are solid concrete or a similar material - But remember to choose the right staircase to suit your environment. I can't stress that point enough!
My walls are 128 units high as standard, I place my ceilings and floors in this manner:
This means a cumulative height of 144 because my floors and ceilings are a thickness of 16. That's 128 + 16.
If you follow my method then in this tutorial you will use make a base brush of 144. 128 is a common number in the Hammer Editor and this holds true for my stair tutorial too.
The width of my stairs will be 128, you wouldn't normally see this in a house or smaller indoor environment, this is more of an open stairwell or outdoor flight of stairs leading to an apartment block.
One thing that you have to judge is what type of stair is suitable for the environment.
A width of 72 would be good for inside a house. 128 is good for an outdoor area. 256 or 512 could be similar to the steps of the City 17 Train Station. You also have to consider the material that would be used.
Fine Aztec engravings would be found in an Aztec Ruin, not in a corporate fire-exit stairwell. Bright-pink shag carpet might be found in the stairs to a girly-girl's apartment, but not in World War 2 where you'd be lucky to find the stairs in one peice.
Use your common sense for these kind of things, if you don't have common sense of your own then refer to the hive-mind to muster up a small spattering of sensibility.
Okay, so we know that we want to go up or down 144.
Next comes some interesting arithmetic which never appears to fail for this stair type.
Despite my strong dislike for this texture, it does help me prove a point. Stairs should preferably be 8 Rise, 12 Run. That's 8 high and 12 deep.
A lot of people use 8 by 8, which works - but it can be tricky to deal with. Some people use 16 by 16, this never works and looks disgustingly wrong. Unless of course you are building a very large, very chunky, somewhat monolithic themed temple in which case it may look perfectly fine. But for a house or industrial style map, it is impractical.
Let's gather our facts;
Our stairs must Rise by 144.
Each step in the flight has a Rise of 8
Each step in the flight has a Run of 12.
Our stairs have a width of 128.
144 / 8 = 18. This means we need 18 steps to fill the gap between floors.
The formula used for this is (Height / Rise = x), it works perfectly for Height / 8, I can't claim it works alright for anything other than this though! Feel free to comment and let me know.
18 * 12 = 216. This means we need a length of 216 to make a comfortable ascent up our stairs.
The formula used for this is (x * Run = y), again; I can only comment on it's suitability for use with the default 8 Rise, 12 Run - but if you find it does or doesn't work with other figures, let us all know.
So if we make a brush that works out to the above specifications, then simply select the Vertex Manipulation tool by clicking it once; locate the "Side (x/z)" viewport and drag down on the top-most white box that does NOT connect to my raised location. Like so;
Then select 'Yes' when prompted to merge the vertices, now this might not be to everyone's favour, but it's the method I have used and find best for me.
After this you'll want to create eighteen brushes that are 8 high by 12 run so they wind up looking as follows;
Now, as you can see for yourself in the "Camera" viewport in the top left, it doesn't seem too tidy; two textures are fighting to be at the forefront, so what we want to do, is highlight every stair in the flight, as you can see in the "Side (x/z)" viewport.
Now select the clip tool and go follow your base triangle shape from end to end and press Shift + X until you see the following;
When the lower half is displayed as red it means when you hit Return it will be deleted, which is exactly what we want to happen. So hit Return and the lower half vanishes.
Now you have a complete flight of stairs, what you'll want to do now is make sure any unseen face, that's the underside of stairs and connecting walls is set to the 'nodraw' texture. Furthermore, it won't hurt to transform the steps to 'func_detail'.
It is recommended you do not alter the 'base triangle' used under the steps, but only the steps themselves. Do this by highlighting your steps as a group and pressing Ctrl + T. A dialogue box should pop up; incidentally, the default option is 'func_detail', so hit 'Apply' and you're done!
The above image just shows how you might want to tidy up some excess brushwork.
Bear in mind, you might need a different style of staircase for a different situation, this tutorial is not definitive as there are always many methods out there - This one works well for me and seems to be pretty optimal for the situation.
Good luck!
Rustvaar
