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de_dust_pcg: planning (May 26, 2005)

I remembered that before I had even laid a Dust-textured brush of Dust PCG, I played around with HL2's mapdev materials and sketched out a rough plan.

Normally, these textures would be reserved for maps where artwork is not yet complete, just as placeholders for the final piece.

I was planning out some brushes in-editor, just to get rough scale right. However using the Dust textures, I was getting too caught up in making the rough structure look good. I was planning out how the map would play, using brushes covered with Dust textures, but my attention was constantly turning to tidying up the brushes and making the place look real, rather than concentrating on the layout.

The solution was to forget the Dust textures, and just use the mapdev materials. I tried it, and a rough layout was easy to transpose, without me starting texture passes or anything silly (I did get a little distracted and started making bizarre structures, but I needed some sort of outlet).

Consider these comparison shots:

To be fair, the orange map was fairly different, but these areas still show a little correlation. The proportions/length and placement of some roads and buildings are exactly the same.

I think you'll agree the similarities are more exciting than a visit by the little old lady next door.

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user comments

smeerkat at 20:55 on May 26, 2005

That's exactly what I was thinking of doing: making the brushes using dev textures (to get the right dimensions) then applying the real textures and detail later. Nice to know I'm on the right track.

Addicted to Morphine at 02:17 on May 27, 2005

I think it works alright if you already have a texture set ready to go. I tried to make a map using only the dev textures, and after I had finished up the layout, I had a hard time finding the right textures to use to fit the geometry. Beautifying and texturing became such a daunting task that I eventually abandoned the map.

dave at 09:22 on May 27, 2005

Addicted to Morphine: What I did with Dust PCG was, having finished with the devmap, I didn't touch it again. Instead, I started creating the real map some 2048 units above the devmap, using all new brushes. The devmap essentially acted as something I could trace in the top view of Hammer.

Trying to use the devmap brushes/geometry would have been very hard work.

smeerkat at 12:14 on May 27, 2005

Can you make a visgroup out of a selected group of brushes, so you can hide them?

dave at 13:09 on May 27, 2005

smeerkat: look for `hide selected items' in one of the menus... it plonks all of them into a new visgroup which you can then rename and edit as you like.

Addicted to Morphine at 14:58 on May 27, 2005

"Trying to use the devmap brushes/geometry would have been very hard work."

I feel silly now. Tracing the layout is a clever idea. I'll give that a shot when I depart from HL2DM and try to make something for CS:S.

Atrocity at 22:30 on May 27, 2005

Good call Dave, I should have did this with my map but I kind of skipped this process, which is obviously needed in my situation.