General Half-Life 2/Architecture
description
Aimed at the more novice end, a full guide on creating better truss like supports.
keywords
truss, trusses, supports, support, better.
This tutorial will teach you how to make a more realistic truss support structure, without eating up performance. It's comprehensive, so noobs will be able to understand it...hopefully.
The traditional way is one solid brush, where each face has a truss texture applied to it. The problem with this is that these truss textures, having alpha channels, can be seen through. The problem is, you can see through to the other side of the truss, but you can't see the texture on that side, so it looks awkward.
This tutorial is for newcomers to mapping and Source who can't edit textures at all, or people who don't want to have to include custom content in their map. You COULD edit the VMT of one of the truss textures and add $nocull to it. That way you could use one solid brush, but be able to see all the sides from any angle. That is easier to accomplish, but not for a noob who wants to learn how to map ONLY. That's why I wrote this tutorial.
Before we start, keep in mind that this truss is meant as under-support for flooring of some sort. However, I will show how you can modify it to fit whatever structure you want.
We will start off by making a nodraw brush with dimensions of 64x64x64, a cube.
Next, resize your grid down to segments of 2 units (using the [ key). Now take the clipping tool out and cut a 2-unit segment at each side of the cube. Doesn't matter which two sides, as long as they're parallel to each other.
(NOTE: Make sure your clipping tool is set to divide the brush into segments WITHOUT deleting parts of it)
Now, delete the middle segment, which would be fat one.
This next part is a lot of work, so pay attention. what I have done is accumulated 6 steps into one picture. You will notice things highlighted in red, with a red number by them. Follow it through, starting from 1 to 6. I will explain step-by-step below.
1: Click the Face Edit Sheet icon, which you see has a red square around it and a number 1, thus making it step one in this 6-step process of doom.
2: As you can see, there is two lines pointing to your newly-made brushes, which will be our truss panels after this process is complete. Select the SQUARE-SHAPED faces of BOTH brushes. There's TWO SQUARE-SHAPED faces for each brush, so make sure you get all FOUR of them.
3: Click the "Browse" button.
4: In the "filter" field, type in "truss" and let the textures load.
5: Choose the texture "metal/metaltruss011a". You can choose any texture that looks like this, but for the sake of simplicity, we will use this one. They all look pretty much the same anyway.
6: Hit the "Apply" button. DON'T DO ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THIS!!!!!!
Hot damn, that was hard as hell now wasn't it? Not really. Anyway, the next thing you will do is hit the "Fit" button. What this will do is fit the textures onto the face so they aren't cut off. YOU MUST DO THIS OR IT WILL LOOK AWKWARD!
Now things get a little difficult (for you noobs). We are going to make the bottom plate of this truss. You want it to be 64x64x2 ("Length x Width x Height" for those lacking knowledge of the formula for volume). The placement of this brush is key. It must be centered in-between our parallel truss panels. And, yes, it must merge with the bottom of the panels! For the texture, I chose "de_prodigy/metal02". You can change this later if you want.
Now that you've made your bottom panel, we will do some vertex manipulation on the bastard. Start by selecting the wireframe cube icon in the tools. It's the very bottom one. Sorry, I forgot to highlight it in red for you blind bats out there. Make sure you have the middle panel selected first before hitting the vertex manipulation tool. Next, you will select the top vertices at each end of the bottom panel. They can be seen in red, with arrows pointing at them. Make sure it's the ends of the bottom panel that merge with the side panels which you are manipulating here. Now, from the side grid view (or front, depending on which way the structure is facing), move these points inward to the center of the structure so they create a slanted edge at the ends of the bottom panel.
To finish up with vertex manipulation, we are gonna do basically the same thing with the side panels. Select both side panels then hit the vertex manipulation tool icon. Now, go to the bottom edge of one of the panels in the same view you used to edit the bottom panel, and select the inner points of that panel's inner botom edge, and pull them up one square (2 units, if you kept the grid size the same). This will create a slant there just like the bottom panel's edges. Now that side panel and the bottom panel's edges should no longer merge and meet perfectly at a slanted corner. Do the EXACT same process on the opposite side panel. Use the image as a reference if you're lost.
The final step is the easiest. Select the entire structure and then hit CTRL+T. A window should pop up, and the structure should now be "func_detail". This is so that the compiler won't build any visleafs from this structure, since it doesn't have any purpose in optimizing the map as would a big wall. You know how an under-support truss for a floor-like structure.
Now, here's a couple of things you can do. First, you can elongate it, which you will pretty much do in the end since it's only 64 units long. Notice the player spawn in the truss. The inside is hollow, and it's large enough to fit a player inside, crouched; possibly standing as well. You could fashion a vent or something out of this if you replace the truss textures with vent textures.
Ah, but there's no top to it you say? Well, since it was meant for under-support, I didn't make a top since it would just be covered by the architecture on top of it. What you can do to this truss if you want to make it be mid-air with nothing on top of it is create a top; using the same process of creating another panel and vertex manipulation! You could always copy the bottom panel and rotate it and slap it on top too. That might save some time. Just make sure you use vertex manipulation on the top edges of the side panels afterward.
You may notice that the bottom panel's texture was replaced. It'll look better that way as a mid-air truss. You could call that solid metal texture a placeholder if you want. It doesn't make a difference. Just make sure that if you replace it with a truss texture, that you "Fit" it to the face so it looks right. Just make sure you haven't elongated the truss first...make sure it's 64x64 units...
Note: You can do this in various dimensions. If you want skinnier trusses, go for it! Just don't select the truss you made here and try and scale it down all at once. It will work, but you will have to refit all the textures, and you might mess up the vertices.
Thus concludes my incredibly super-duper comprehensive truss tutorial. Hope you enjoyed it.
-Nub-
