Editing Tips
Interlopers Editing Tips
We've collated some useful tips for you to read and learn from. Whether you're a complete novice or an advanced level designer - you should find something here to interest you.
To contribute your own useful tips please visit this thread and read the first post for instructions.
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Tips statistics
In total there are 50 tips
The users who submitted the most tips are:
- Blink ( 12 )
- source-maps ( 2 )
- Zecrah ( 2 )
- Mage_ofOld ( 2 )
- forty-nin3 ( 2 )
The users with the highest rated tips are:
- Penney ( 3.00 )
- forty-nin3 ( 3.00 )
- Ripper_hugme ( 2.00 )
- Spartan ( 2.00 )
- lillerik ( 2.00 )
Re: Tips Submission Thread
Tip Rating: 0.00
Alt-Right click: Used to align a texture as to the face selected. (Perfect for aligning textures on corners with ease)
Ctrl-M: While in selection mode to rotate, scale, and move based on input values. (Very useful for turning brushes and props with precision.)
Walls are ~16-8 units thick, 128 units high, and the space in-between floors is ~32-16
Stairs are ~Rise-8 units, Run-12 units
Arches are easier to build if one makes it manually (using vertex-edited blocks) from the outside of a cylinder brush.
The skew tool loses alignment to the grid if used more than once on the same edge.Category: Hammer
Smoothing textures to create smooth shadows
Tip Rating: 2.00
Select a face from the brush, hold "alt" and right click on the surface you want to align. Move each align to the next face. When your texture is properly aligned see if a single brush face is big enough for one lightmap luxel.
(3D window/lightmap grid) If not select the facetexture open its properties and choose a smaller lightmap grid. (default is 16, use numbers value of 2 => 16/8/4/2/1 ) Go back in to normal shaded/textured view. Select the faces you want to smooth (hold "CTRL"). Then go back into lightmap grid and click smooth, then select a number for its smoothing group.Category: Hammer
A Quick Clone
Tip Rating: 3.00
If you hate copying and pasting in hammer and having the copied object/brush be completely away from where you want, you can hold Shift + Drag the object you want to duplicate it, really quick duplications if you're placing many barrels or some brushes.
Category: Hammer
Moulding your world
Tip Rating: -1.00
Practice using the clip and vertex tools. They will come in handy when creating complex geometry or simply spicing up a bland blocky room. Even a little goes a long way.
Category: Hammer
Compile Often
Tip Rating: 1.00
This may sound weird but compiling is not something that needs to be left to the end. Compile after you do each major changes, displacements, all props, lighting etc because compiling at the end of your map will take ages - so any problems that come up won't be obvious until then.
Category: Hammer
Re: Tips Submission Thread
Tip Rating: 0.00
While in Paint Geometry mode:
Alt + LMB = Change Radius (Drag Mouse)
Shift + LMB = Move up and down (Drag Mouse)
Alt + RMB = Get the normal of the current face
Ctrl + LMB = Select/Deselect displacementCategory: Hammer
Easy Texture Scrolling
Tip Rating: 0.00
Select a face with the Face Edit Sheet and then just use your arrow keys to scroll the texture easily.
Category: Hammer
Keep things in scale
Tip Rating: 2.00
By using the dev textures you can ensure parts of your map stay in proportion with the player. Things such as doors and walls have specific textures for this use. Failing that, add several info_player_start entities in your map when you are working on new areas - this will give you a constant visual reminder of your level in relation to the player.
Category: Hammer
Untextured Geometry.
Tip Rating: 2.00
When using dev textures or placeholder textures on complex and repeated geometry such as multi-brush pillars and archways for hallways, just keep one and use a simple brush as a reference for the rest.
Category: Hammer
Shortcuts
Tip Rating: 1.00
Get to know the shortcuts! You'll save yourself a few seconds each time you use one, and that'll build up to minutes and hours as you continue mapping.
Every action that will be used relatively often will have a shortcut; take the time to check what they are, and memorise them by using them.
Most of the common tool shortcuts are accessed through the SHIFT key and use the lower left side of the keyboard for easy access.
Use shortcuts! They aren't called shortcuts for nothing.Category: Hammer
Spice up vents
Tip Rating: 1.00
You can make normal model vents look a bit more interesting by adding a smaller vent to the side at varying intervals. Adding models/props_vents/vent_medium_grill001.mdl as an add-on to normal vents will compliment it nicely and break up the monotony of long vent systems.
Category: Hammer
Splitting Vertices
Tip Rating: 2.00
Splitting Vertices can be useful in many situations. For example, if you make a curved corner you don't want to have long thin pieces so you can split a edge and make it have larger pieces.
Like this:
- Select a face
- Press CTRL+F while you have selected a Yellow square
- Move the newly created vertices
Category: Hammer
Creating displacements the easy way
Tip Rating: -1.00
Right after turning a brush into a displacement, deselect the sides of the displacement you want to stay by CTRL+Left click and hit Destroy.
Now you have no unnecessary sides which probably would have confused you when painting the geometry.
This will also increase performance and the decrease the time of the compiling process.Category: Hammer
Flexible rotation
Tip Rating: 2.00
Do you think it's annoying when you can't rotate things 180 with exact precision? Well have you tried ticking the "15 degree rotation" box in the "2D view"-settings? Do that and it shouldn't be a problem. What? You need stepless rotation again? Well, just hold the shift button and rotate.
Category: Hammer
Re: Flexible rotation
Tip Rating: -1.00
"Do you think it's annoying when you can't rotate things 180 with exact precision? Well have you tried ticking the "15 degree rotation" box in the "2D view"-settings? Do that and it shouldn't be a problem. What? You need stepless rotation again? Well, just hold the shift button and rotate." - lillerik
Or...
Press Ctrl+M and type in 180 in "X" and press OK.Category: Hammer