General Half-Life 2/Architecture
description
What to do with those bland walls in your map, from idea to paper to hammer- This is the first half of two tutorials on adding some pizzazz to your bland walls.
keywords
Detail, walls, drawing, concepts, detailing.
Detailing Walls
This tutorial is aimed towards both the average and experienced mapper who gets going quickly and forgets or doesn't know what to do with their bland walls. This should help those walls that are flat, get phat!
This will be part one of a two phase tutorial where we quickly whip some things up on paper and then bring our created ideas into hammer and implement them, In the second phase we will go over some basic concepts of blocking out detail effectively.
Let's get started!
Our first step is to pick our room or wall. I've chosen to make the side of a futuristic fortress. The next part is fun and easy. Come up with a few side profiles in 2D of what it would look like if you cut it in half and looked at it from the side.
Drawing this way lets you not have to worry about that third dimension, at least not yet as we should only be combining shapes to come up with our side profile, as you can see it's fairly basic but gives our wall some function. The player can run along the top of the awning or roof. I've added the awning overhanging the walkway below it to ad some challenge, there could be other players or NPCs right above them and unless they were careful those bad dudes might just get ‘the drop' so to speak on the player.
Another thing I've done (other then used the mighty graph paper) is measured one square as 64 units. Depending on the width of your wall you may want to pick a smaller number, but I'd recommend picking something that textures will go easily on (16, 32, 64, 128 etc), You may want to add some small bits of extra detail to your wall that aren't very big- thin column supports or lights etc. you don't need the grids for those necessarily. As long as you label them and have a good understanding of what you're making and why, that's the main thing. Later I may want to add some more detail like supports and ceiling beds to give it some extra ‘pizzazz' but this is the base shape for now.
Another thing you should keep in mind about what you're drawing is how practical/plausible is it? This amount of thickness is fine for my fortress because it says the wall is thick and harder to penetrate.
If you were doing the inside of a house or mansion you may want something thinner because it's more for decoration and not meant to be 21 feet thick.
We should now have a basic idea of what the side of our walls are going to look like, to us they seem practical and plausible to find in the type of environment we're building or recreating and we can move on to the next part.
This part can be jumped to, or skipped at your discretion. I'm going to do it because we're going to take our 2D drawing and give it a third dimension. I'm going to use Google Sketchup because I find it very easy and effective to use, if you have another program you're just as comfortable with, go ahead!
The reason we're doing this is to give ourselves an idea of what it will look like if we continue with the side profile we've picked. But like I mentioned before we can choose to skip one or the other steps, but if it were me I'd take the pen and paper route.
If you don't know what or how to use Google Sketchup you can find it and a knowledge base of it here: http://sketchup.google.com/
I've gone ahead and made my side profile come to life.
At this point I can now think in 3D and if I have a printer handy or a paint program I can have another go with my detail. We've brought a concept to paper, and then quickly modeled it to give ourselves an idea of what it's going to look like when it's complete.
And using paint/photoshop we've taken the process another step foreword and given a little more detail to work from.
This tutorial is an example of how a concept started on paper or quick painting can really help your ideas evolve and was designed to get you thinking, refreshed right after spending hours blocking out your map.
In our next phase we will take this complex wall and bring it into hammer.
- Penney
