Low r_speed Cliff Walls
Premise Creating realistic terrain with a low number of faces is very hard in Half-Life, unless you know a few little tricks. In this tutorial, I'm going to try to show/explain a few of the tricks that some mappers use for cliff walls. 1. For the first step, make a cliff face brush using a rocky texture such as "-0OUT_RK5". Then select "SKY" and make a brush that covers the back of the wall to prevent leaks.
2. Now, using the same area as the large rock brush, split it up into two or three brushes.
3. Next, you have to clip the all of the corners that touch each other a little bit (remember to clip each corner differently, otherwise you'll have a bunch of identical corners).
4. It should look pretty good by now, but it sure doesn't look natural yet. Make another brush using the rock texture that presses up against the cliff face (make sure it goes back into the cliff face a ways, because of the parts where the cliff juts in).
5. Now clip the top showing corners on your new brush to make it look like a rock formation jutting out of the cliff face.
6. Now make a brush about 32 units above the ground and 16 below around the last brush using the "OUT_SND2" texture or whatever texture you want to use for the ground.
7. Next, clip the sides of the sand brush by clipping from the bottom corner to the top middle (remember to only clip visible sides to reduce face counts). Also, clip the visible corners in the XY (top) view a little bit.
That's it, you're done! Now you have a partially believable cliff wall with around only 50 faces! You can use this idea on many walls, using different amounts of brushes, excluding the rock formation, or other things so that your map doesn't look repetitive, but natural with low r_speeds. If you want an example of this technique in action, download RESdm off of WONswap. |