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Tutorials: Mapping: Complete Beginners' Guide to Embrace

by Kiramin

A major improvement over that first map, huh? Its still square and boring, though, so lets spice it up some.

5. Edge and Vertex Manipulation

What can we do to make this courtyard more interesting? Well, lets start by adding some beems/pillars along two of the walls. Create a new brush that is 64 x 64 in one corner of the courtyard. Adjust it's height so it is sitting on the ground and is 192 (3 large grid squares) high. A perfectly straight and narrow pillar would still be pretty boring, so we are going to slope the bottom. To do this, hit CTRL-TAB or click the XYZ button to switch to the front view. Now hit E.

You just turned on edge manipulation. A bunch of blue dots should have appeared around the surfaces of your brush. Each one of those dots is an edge. Look at your brush from a couple different angles in the camera window to get a good idea of which blue dots represent which edge. You want to grab the edge in the lowest right corner of your brush, and drag it 64 units.

BEFORE

AFTER

There is also a vertex manipulation mode. That allows you to move the corners of the brush. However, this is often a difficult tool for beginners to work with, because it will automatically move the other vertices of the brush to make sure it maintains a valid shape. It takes a lot of geometrical forsight and practice to use this tool effectively. You can toggle it on and off by hitting V, though I don't recommend trying it until you are more experienced and have a chance to experiement with it a bunch.

Back to the map at hand: Now your pillar's base should be sloped in towards the courtyard. You should probably pick a decent texture for the pillar too. I like the texture "ctwall2_btm" because it resembles the wall texture but is different. Now switch back to XY Top view and make another piece of pillar that is 64 x 64, resting on top of the the sloped pillar. I textured this piece as "ctwall2_mid" because those two textures fit together but it makes the top look different from the base. Make this second peice 256 (4 large grid-squares) high.

You now have a pillar that is almost as tall as your courtyard with a sloped base. You need to turn this into multiple pillars. Select both pieces, copy them and space them 256 (4 large grid-squares) apart along the west wall. You should end up with four pillars total (two in the corners and two near the center) with all their bases sloping into the courtyard. They look kind of funny as they are now, because they aren't supporting anything. So lets make a long brush that stretches the length of the courtyard and rests atop them. I chose the texture "ctwall1_top" for this, because once again it fits the theme, but adds a bit of variety. Here is a shot of what your pillars should look like in the Camera Window:

6. Multiple Selections

Of course, we need to put a similar set of pillars on the wall across from this one. You need to select all of the pillars to do this. Don't go click on them yet though. When you need to select lots of brushes at once, you can use this little trick I'm about to show you. Create a new brush completely containing all your pillar brushes (and only your pillar brushes. Below are a pictures of what the brush should look like in each of the 3 views:

XY Top	XZ Front
YZ Side

With ONLY your new brush selected, right click in the 2D Window to bring up the menu. Choose "Select" and then "Inside". The brush you had selected will be destroyed and now all the brushes that were contained within (all the pillars) will be selected. You may have noticed some other options listed under the "Select" sub-menu. I will explain them all breifly:

• Complete Tall - This option selects all brushes that are completely contained within the selection brush as seen from the XY Top view. That means that regardless of the heights and elevations of the brushes involved, they will be selected as long as they are completely contained in the XY view.
• Touching - This option selects all brushes that even slightly overlap the selection brush. This DOES consider height. Meaning, that even if a brush appears to be contained within the selection brush in the XY view, it will not be selected if it is not intersecting it in both of the Z views.
• Partial Tall - Like the other "Tall" option, this only pays attention to the XY view. However, this will select all the brushes that are even partially intersecting the selection brush in the XY view.
• Inside - As you saw, this selects all brushes that are completely contained within the selection brush in all three dimensions.
• All Sectors - This selects all the sectors in the map.

Now that you have all your pillars selected, copy them by hitting space bar. Then, clip the "Flip across Y" button and move them up against the east wall. Now, make a copy of one of the long brushes that runs along the top of the pillars. Use it to make a similar brush running along the top of the north and south walls as well. Make sure that they only touch their eastern and western brothers. You should NOT overlap brushes. Though your map will most likely work, overlapping brushes can lead to unexpected complications, expecially in more complicated maps.

7. Selection and Manipulating Individual Surfaces

Take a look around your level in the Camera Window. You might happen to notice one small oddity:

No. Not the word "BAD" in big red letters. You wont see that because I added it in Photoshop. You might have noticed that the bricks on the bottom of the long beam dont match up with the bricks on the side. This is know as a texture misalignment and it is a very, very bad thing. It makes your map look sloppy and unbelievable. How do you fix this? Well, you have to select ONLY the bottom surface of the brush and rotate the texture. To select only a surface, hold down CTRL and SHIFT and left click on the surface in the camera window. That surface (and only that surface) will highlight red.

You can do a lot of stuff with only a single surface selected. You can shift the texture by holding down the SHIFT key and using the arrow keys. You can expand and contract the texture in different directions by holding down the CTRL key and using the arrow keys. And you can edit the surface's properties. You do this in the same way you made brushes sky or walkable: press the S key. In fact, when you use the Surface Inspector while selecting a whole brush, it is just as if you are selecting all of the surfaces of the brush and applying those properties to all of them. So, you can just set a single surface of a brush to sky, or to walkable, etc. In fact, for walkable surfaces I usually set each surface one at a time.

Go ahead and bring up the Surface Inspector while you are selecting just that bottom surface. You will see some fields on the left side. One of them is labled rotate. Type in 90 and hit apply. If it looks better but the bricks still dont line up quite right, then try 270. When you have matched up the bottom and the side, hit OK. Go check the bottom of all of your beams to make sure the textures line up right.

Phew... Much better. Now that we have that out of the way, we can move on to Page 3.