Thanks kraid for all the advice.
I UV unwrapped the bevelled windows, had to redo some of the geometry. want to try and texture soon, thinking a stone type texture like the original not sure how difficult getting something similar will be.
Also spent time fixing things in the map and making other small props, like ceilings and wires for the building. Probably should not have done that yet.
I want to add variation to the office ceiling, HL2 had done similar things I will try and do something similar.
128x128 unit ceiling panel work in progress
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t1yff7xn1qfrt ... ling_1.JPGvarious basic wires and basic ceiling parts.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zozzuslw04yv0 ... ling_2.JPGVarious pictures of the window
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mxip6r30z4no3 ... xture2.JPGhttps://www.dropbox.com/s/xtd6mgqtp6rct ... xture3.JPGhttps://www.dropbox.com/s/gkihid9efdx7k ... xture4.JPGhttps://www.dropbox.com/s/gaapssqpdykqi ... xture5.JPGhttps://www.dropbox.com/s/grdkea4maypdk ... ture_6.JPGIn Blender does a sharp edge mean a hard edge? So far I have not used sharp edges that much, if I understand I should have created a simple window and put smooth faces over the whole window then use sharp edge on those edges that I wanted more definition.
These windows due to the bevel modifier has caused an increase in the polygon count, one full window has 360 faces while the full damaged version of the same window has 898 faces that is probably too much. The building so far on just 2 sides has over 20 windows I think this will eventually add up and lower the frame rate in the engine. LOD I think can help?
In this case the bevel is acting like smooth but at the expense of added geometry my bad. I had the simple versions of the windows but because I made so many changes during the bevel process I decided to delete the simple versions as the models had too many changes. I thought with this new bevelled window I could just delete edge loops and vertices if I am to create lower polyon version a Level Of Detail (LOD)version. Is this not the right direction?
I would like to try Xnormals to edit normals that might help , if I can understand it. I do not think blender has an internal normals edit function yet.
The only downside of these beveled edges is that under certain circumstances, some very long and thin triangles might increase rendering time and maybe even produce calculation errors.
TBH, i never had issues with this so far.
Perhaps it was best if I did not add a bevel but it does look better if the bevel is there. On the other side these bevels have the ability to produce these long triangle errors. Would this increase of 'render' and errors appear in hammer/game engine or in Blender or both? I hope there is no problems.
At the beginning this seems to be the logical choice, but if there are a lot of windows that need to be placed, it might be a pain in the ass to align all these model parts correctly in hammer, beside boosting the objects count a lot.
The only reason for seperating these, would be the need of a different impact sound. Otherwise you should keep the whole window combined.
This caused me to change how the set was to be created
This is a set of windows that consists of 28 parts and 12 that have full parts.
12-full windows(made up of the parts)
12-inner window frames
12-outer window frames
4-top arch frames
2 types of width, 2 different heights, each with 3 variations. Complete, damage complete and damaged.
With the parts also being separate there is more than enough I hope this gives as much variation as possible. One can use just the outer frames with a different window texture or the inner frame with a different outer frame, that is what I hope.
From what I understand I can use one texture sheet for all these parts, is this correct? (there is no glass)
Using one texture sheet should help with performance or should it not?
All 40 parts fit on one texture sheet, I am not sure how large the texture sheet should be, I was thinking 2048x2048 perhaps 2048 is too much. 1024x1024 I think the resolution won't be enough too many parts.
These stone type window models can replace all the textures that have windows on them.
This is the UV layout 2048x2048
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9l3zapv2nty11 ... xture1.JPG