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Tutorials: Mapping: Complete Beginners' Guide to Embrace

by Kiramin

You already know the most basic steps for making a map in vampire, but you still lack the knowledge of many tools you will need if you want to make a good map. I will cover those tools in this tutorial. To begin, let us start a new map. Remember to save it right away.

Lets make this map a fair sized courtyard, open to the night sky. Instead of using the make hollow tool, I am going to walk you through the process of building it brush by brush. I prefer to do it this way even though it may be a bit slower, because it is usually cleaner and more efficient. Lets make the courtyard 1024 x 1024. So create a brush that is 64 thick just to the left of the -512 y (vertical) grid-line. Make this brush extend an extra 64 units above x (horizontal) 512 and below the x -512 grid-lines.

1. Using Clipping Mode

With the brush selected hit X or press the button. You just turned on clipping mode. You use clipping mode to cut brushes. Click once at the top left corner of your brush, and click again down and to the right 64 units. This should have created a little blue dot labled "1" at your first click and a another blue dot labled "2" at your second. These two points form the line along which your brush will be cut. If you didn't place them correctly, you can move the dots by clicking on them, holding, and dragging. If you miss and click somewhere else, it will create a third dot. This is used for clipping in all three dimensions (three dots for a plane, not a line). I will not be covering 3-point clipping in this tutorial due to its advanced and more complex nature. If you accidently created that third dot, click once more to erase all your dots and create a new "1" dot. Move your two dots around so that your brush looks like the BEFORE image below. When it does, press Q. It should now look like the after image.

BEFORE

AFTER

The yellow outlined piece of the brush is the piece which will be deleted after the brush is clipped. Now we need to clip a similar cut down at the bottom of the brush. Make your first dot at the lower left corner and make your second up and to the right 64 units. Here are those before and after pictures again (but don't hit Q yet):

BEFORE

AFTER

Hmmm... Something isn't quite right here. If you hit Q like I warned you not to, you are probably feeling as stupid as me right now. I deleted the wrong side of my clip. Now I have to go back and create a new brush and clip the top over again. You, on the other hand, have an easier solution. With your clipping points still in place, hold down CTRL while pressing Q. This should switch the side you want to delete, so now the little corner is outlined in yellow. Go ahead and hit Q now.

BEFORE

AFTER

2. Copying and Rotating Brushes

Much better. You should now have a brush with a right side that is exactly 1024 units long, with a top and bottom that slope outwards at 45 degree angles (Before we go any further, turn off clipping by hitting ESCAPE). This is going to be the west wall of our courtyard. I know what you are thinking: "You mean we have to do this tedious clipping thing 3 more times for the other three walls?!" No we don't! This is where we copy the brush and use the rotation tools to make our life easier. To copy brushes, select the brushes you want to copy and hit SPACEBAR. You now have a second identical brush.

Along the tool bar you should see a set of buttons that look like this:
These are the rotation and flip buttons. They are "Flip across X", "Rotate around X", "Flip across Y", "Rotate around Y", "Flip across Z", and "Rotate around Z". Since you want to change your brush's orientation as seen from the top down window, you want to rotate it around the Z axis. So hit the "Rotate around Z" button. This will rotate your brush 90 degrees clockwise around the Z axis. Now move the brush so that the two angled edges fit together in the top-left corner. Like this:

Make a copy of this second brush, rotate the third brush around the Z axis again and fit it against the second brush. Then repeat the process with a fourth brush. You should now have placed all four walls of your courtyard:

3. Resizing Multiple Brushes

Exellent. Wait a second... Take a look at the Z-height window. Those brushes are only 8 units tall! Not a very impossing wall. Lets fix that. You need to select all four brushes. When you have them all selected, use the Z-height window to raise them to 512 in height. Also, lower their bases to -64. Why? So they extend a short ways into where the "ground" is going to be (I will be getting to that in a moment).

Since you happen to have all the walls selected, now would be a great time to pick a texture for them. So load up a texture set from the Textures menu. I chose prague, because I'm going for that dark age castle look. I chose the texture "ctwall1_side" for my walls:

Now, too make the ground. Hit ESCAPE to deselect all the brushes and create a new brush that fills the box formed by the four walls. In the Z-height window, have its base at -64 (lined up with the base of the walls) and its top at 0. Pick a good ground texture for it. I chose "grass1_1_p" for my ground:

We better set the walk flag before we forget. With only the ground brush selected, hit S, check the box labled "walk", and hit ok. Well, whats missing? Oh yeah, the ceiling. You are probably thinking "But wasn't this courtyard going to open to the sky?" Yes, it is. But if you try to run your map like this, you wont see sky when you look up out of the courtyard. You will see what is known in extremely technical game-industry standard terminology as "Hall of Mirrors." Ok, so it isn't that technical. Basically, since there is no brush there, there is nothing for the game to render, so it doesn't render anything. That means that whatever was displayed on that part of the screen wont get drawn over, so as you turn your view, the edges of the walls leave these funky flashing trails that look like a million reflections of one another. Hence... Hall of Mirrors.

4. Making Sky, Fog, and Music

To make the game render the sky, you must create a sky brush and use it to cover the courtyard. So drag a brush that extends over the empty courtyard and all the way to the edges of the walls (make sure to set it right on top of the walls in the Z-height window). You don't have to worry about the texture, because the game wont draw the brush in the conventional way. Hit S as you did with the ground. Instead of setting it to "walk", set it to "sky" and hit OK.