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Tutorials: Mapping: Complete Beginners' Guide to Embrace

by Kiramin

You should now have a couryard with beams running along the side. This is almost a functional Vampire map. However, you wont be able to use it in conjunction with other maps unless you make an exit.

We could just make a door directly in the side of the wall, but instead lets place it in an arched alcove in the wall. Why? Because it will look cooler and it will give me a chance to explain how to use arbitrary sided brushes and the subtract function.

8. Arbitrary Sided Brushes and the Subtract Function

So far, we have only made brushes that are square. What if you want to make a brush that appears rounded? Well, you create an abritrary sided brush. To do this, create a brush that is the same width as you want your cylindrical brush. Then you bring down the Brush menu. You will see a list of different sided brushes. Select one and it will transform your brush into a brush with that many sides. You can also pick the arbitrary option to type in a number of sides greater than nine. (Note: The Primitives option will allow you to turn your brush into a cone or a sphere).

BEFORE

AFTER

You can use this to make pillars and arches. The pillars should be pretty straight forward, but you might be wondering how a solid cylinder can be turned into an arch. Well, I will show you. First we need to prepare the north wall of the courtyard for our arch. Do this by stretching the north edge upwards about 256 units. If you like to keep your stuff pretty like me, then you might cleave off the edges that are sticking out.

Now you need to cleave it 128 units north of the walls southern side. However, you don't want to delete either half. So what do you do? Hold down SHIFT when you press Q. This should cut the brush in half, but not delete any of it.

Select only the southern piece of the wall, and switch to the XZ Front view. Use the SHIFT+Q cleaving method to carve that piece of wall up in to the sections shown below:

Delete the middle chunk that is the second to the bottom (marked on the diagram above by the yellow X). Now this is where the arbitrary brush comes in to play. Switch back to XY Top view and create a brush that is 256 x 256 units. With only it selected, bring down the brush menu, select arbitrary sided... and type in 12.

BEFORE

AFTER

Rotate the brush around the X axis. This will tilt the cylinder so that it is running horizontally up and down. Elongate it in that direction (and only in that direction) and place it so that its top half fills the second to top segment in the middle of the north wall. Make sure it only extends into the southern half of the north wall and not into the back half. Below are some diagrams to better illustrate what the heck I am talking about:

Camera View	XZ Front
XY Top

Here is the part that we have all been waiting for! (SAVE FIRST!) Click the on the toolbar. You did it? ... ... Ok ... You are probably wondering "WHAT THE HECK DID THAT DO?" That was the CSG_Subtract function. It takes every peice of any brush that is overlapped by the selected brush, and deletes it. This usually forces the editor to break up the subtracted brushes into smaller brushes that fit around the chunk that got deleted. This is because brushes must be convex (they can't bend outwards, only inwards). Here is a diagram that demonstrates the difference between a convex and non-convex (concave) shape:

The black arrow is identifying the angle that points into the shape, making it concave. That gray dotted line shows you how you could break up that concave shape into two convex shapes. Ok, enough geometry, I still haven't really explained what you just did. Delete the cylinder brush and take a good look in the camera window.

Camera Window

XZ Front

Yes, that is an arch. You will see in the diagram on the right, that the cylinder "subtracted" every part of the brush it intersected, breaking up the remaining brush into those smaller (selected) pieces. That is the purpose of the subtract function and it has many more useful applications. However, have caution. The Subtract function isn't very intelligent in the way it breaks up brushes, so when you are using it, I strongly recommend subtracting from the smallest brush possible. Let me show you what things would look like if we had cleaved up the north wall less efficiently before using the subtract function:

Granted, you still would have succeeded at making an arch. But this method broke the northern wall up into tons of oddly shaped and angled brushes that are messy to look at and work with. That is why it is a good idea to limit the area that the subtract function will effect. At this point, be sure to set the floor of the arch and the vertical face of the step up to walkable. If you don't make the front of the step walkable, the characters wont be able to step up into the arch. After that, we are ready to build a door in our archway, so come on over to Page 4.