My first real attempt at a good dif

#1 Oops, wrong code

#2 Very cool, nice place to work off of, will look forward to seeing the process you go through :) Wish you the best of luck!

#3 Nice first building Mark :)

#4 @Mark

I would like to take a look at the building but you exceeded your data limit from geocities. Check out Imageshack where you can post screens for free with unlimited bandwith. They have autocreated thumbnails that you can use to post in forums so that you dont cause unneccessarily large downloads for people viewing the forums and save bandwith for ImageShack in the process.

#5 OK, Ive deleted the old post with the humungous images and started an account with imageshack,
so now I get thumbnails!! Heres my progress from before, as well as an update of how its gone since I posted those:





And here is where it's at now, no more duct on the front, I'm going to redo that so it looks like the photo,
its hard to tell from this shot but there is a brick ledge at the roof, and the all around frame of bricks
is now closer to the color of the photo, it's coming along.



Once again, if it is possible to use alpha channel transparency in png's for the window detail, please somebody tell me how, or
where to go to learn, and also, is there a way to attach nodes to the dif so that dts shapes will attach automatically, or is
that pretty much based on the built in editor?

Well back to work, this project ain't even close to finished!!

#6 Oh... Nice!

Alphas, we all hate 'em, but we all love them at the same time.

#7 What's the street address?....very close to the offices of RexHeavyIndustries....wonder if this structure is still standing? I've never seen it....if it's in Emeryville, might be close to Pixar....good lunch spots nearby.

#8 A resource for adding DIF transparency.

You may run into sorting issues if you have windows facing each other, but this doesn't look like it will be a huge problem for this map.

#9 Awesome!! I'll check out that resource immediatly!! As for the location of the building, I'm really not to sure, but here is where I found it here
It's a really interesting page with a few really unique structures.

#10 I ran into a snag, my portals aren't keeping the light out! It does'nt seem like it should be to hard to figure out why but for some reason it is. I only have the windows in the front of the building portalled, I used one big portal for all of them. Should I use one for each? Right now the construct is mainly a box with about 20 holes on one side with on portal across the whole side to keep environment light out and it is'nt working. any ideas?

#11 Shouldn't make a huge difference if you use one or many... depends on whether you plan to split the interior up into multiple rooms / floors. If you use just one, you'll probably want to set the brushes that divide it to be detail, though portals MUST be square, even after splitting, and can't contain multiple brushes. Also, check the portal properties to see if the ambient_light entry is set to "passes through"

#12 :::UPDATE TIME!!:::

OK, for a change of pace, and to avoid tunnel vision, I have begun working on the interior of the main building, whose exterior progress is about 98%. I;m fairly happy with the texturing save for a bit of touch-up on resolutions and details, the bulk of the exterior
detail will be in DTS format due to geometric limitations of DIF. More specifically, I tried to make the pipes about 6 different ways and got errors. Oh well.

Here is the current exterior, it has portals but the inside is lit so you can't tell:


Onwards:

As I was saying I have started on the interior of the building, not interior like file, interior as "inside". I found that the easiest way to make complicated inner workings of a large building, is to make a platform, resized to the length and width of the inner exterior,
then copied and pasted right into a seperate map file, this way scaling is accurate, and all the clutter from the exterior is'nt in the way.
Here is the interior at it's current point of progression:



The main bulk of the structure is classified as structural brushes, and the more irregular polyhedrons used for structural detail are classified as detail brushes, which show up as yellow. [I'm being really thorough incase another newborn indie graces this thread]
The reason for this is that when you place a polyhedron face to face with another larger polyhedron, map2dif slices up the faces and you get a larger face count. If you classify the smaller poly [or brush] as a detail brush,map2dif doesn't slice things up as much, it's complicated, theres a resource on it, I will add a link to it later.

Anyhoo, some problems arrise during the process of DIF construction, as I have learned quite painfully.



Lookin good so far? Well, this thing is actually riddled with a problem called leaking.



Beautiful. just beautiful. This problem can be fixed with tagging and glueing. Which is to say, select the offending face, tag it, then select the facing face, and glue it to the tagged face. This is in quark BTW. I will link a tut for this as well.

Theres a few more problems I've encountered, but time is not in abundance, so I will update this post later.

Thanx for reading!!

#13 BTW, I've been having a problem that I can't figure out. I was working on the inner workings of the building, I made a wall, tagged and glued it, then made a block and subtracted it, and now light leaks through every edge! I tried tagging and glueing on everything, but it still leaks...Is there some kind of geometric anomoly going on here? It seems quark has a few of those... Not to disrespect quark or the people working on it, they're doing an awesome job, especially considering the program is free...

#14 I had a similar problem, never found out what it was. I re-tagged/glued everything aswell, still leaked like a mo. If you find the problem, please post it.

#15 www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=25888 Maybe this thread can help you out. Some good info in there.