Nubcakes Mapping Tutorial - 56k warning (LONG)

[nubcake]

Nubcakes mapping log:

Alien Default for Waveform – Part 1.

 This tutorial is designed for people who know the basics for GTK but want to make their map look that extra bit special.

 First think of a theme for your map and know the look you are trying to achieve. In waveform, we are in a ship in low orbit around a planet, therefore the lighting will be light or light blue. I have decided to use as many standard tremulous textures as possible, to keep the download limit to a minimum.
 I have decided to make the alien base in a cockpit. So the most important thing to think of right now is
A)   The cockpit needs to look like a cockpit
B)   Being an alien base it needs to be blocked off so trappers, tubes  etc may be built and hard to destroy
C)   What features will make this room stand out

So here is what I do:

1)   Using  Caulk (Common > Caulk) I build a basic room that I want to be the alien base. I know a good sized hall and room height is 192 units high and 192 units wide (press 7 on keyboard and it’s three units high/across). This also gives me plenty of room to add extra good looking features.
 You will notice I haven’t added a roof yet. This is just my personal preference to do it last or when I absolutely need to. I tend to build my maps from the ‘ground up’ literally.



 Also, you will see I added in an Overmind and left the wall off the far bottom room. I did this because the Overmind gives me a little bit of in-game perspective, and the missing wall will be where the actual cockpit will be .

2)   Detailing the floor.  If you look at my original shot, I haven’t used just one big piece for the floor. I use a series of smaller pieces that fit together to just fit the floor. I do this for a number of reasons;
A)   Because it uses less system resources to ‘paint’ the entire surface
B)   Maybe it’s just me, but a rarely get light leaks along the walls/floor doing this
C)   So when it comes time to add detail (like now) it is far easier to do.
So to detail the floor, again, have a plan. For the theme of a ship, the cockpit/command area should be quite smooth and comfortable looking. Unlike the rest of the map that has metallic floors. I will try to use carpet or a smooth concrete, or something comfortable looking.  
The room has been broken up into 3 distinct areas, the two halls leading into the base (which I will make metallic), the main area (including the OM in the ‘command’ area which shall be smooth/carpet/tiling) and the cockpit area (futuristic). This will require the area to be blended in a fair amount.

So, step by step.

A)   Shift + click on my two hallway floors leading into the base. I then copy/paste them into a new GTKradiant. This is so I can see them more clearly and so I won’t be distracted by anything else. Don’t move the pieces around on your new GTK. This way you can simply just copy/ paste the new piece straight back into your main GTK.
B)   I then start cutting the floor into the piece I would like (always try to have caulk selected when splitting up a brush so you don’t have to retexture the inside of the brushes) by pressing x and using the clipper tool. I have cut it as shown below



C)   I then Shift + click on the surfaces to select one face only, and then texture it.



D)   I then copy it straight back into my main map of the room. I do this for all surfaces.
 The aim is to have a nice natural looking floor. The only technique I have used here is two point clipping (clipper tool). Use the keys 1 to 9, these are you friends, they change grid size.
Eventually as I detail piece by piece, and making some minor adjustments for the walls to suit my floor, it eventually looks like this:



This does not mean that the floor is done. This is just the simple layout that helps set the scene so I can adjust the area so suit the theme/gameplay.
Notes/tips to take away:
•   It is generally easier to take apart a room piece by piece and work on it in a separate GTK
•   If you have an identical wall on the opposite side of the room, just work on one wall then copy it and flip it.
•   Make the room look uniform, that is, If you have a feature somewhere, make it a recurring one. In this case, it was simply the skirting around the floor to connect to the floor.
•   Don’t try to build the room all at once, break it down.

Not Every map has to be built from floor up. For example, in the navigation room, this is the process I used:








Part 2) The Walls.
tbc...

[Demolution]

It would have been a good idea to reserve another post such as this one. Good tutorial so far.

[mooseberry]

What he said ^^ I think a mod could maybe move these posts?

Anyways, looks like a good start so far, and it can be useful, you just have to keep at it and get it a lot longer.

Also, I don't really get the second part. I see you are documenting the stages of your map building, but I think you will need text to go along with it to be more helpful.

[nubcake]

Part 2: Walls
I like to start out with my walls being 128 GU (game units) thick. This leaves plenty of space for me to chop them up, and I can always resize when I need to. To make them 128 GU thick, press 7 and one block is 128x128x128 GU.
As the same process with the floors, I take a wall, open up another GTK and copy/paste the wall into it.
The process I use to determine what type of wall I detail is like a Q&A;
a)   What type of area will it be in? It will be in a command centre/ flight deck for a ship
b)   What type of detailing would be here? In this case I won’t need pipes in the walls (more suitable for an engine are), but more computer screens, lockers, a nice wall paint etc.
Then I take the wall and experiment for a look I like. Some people tend to do what I call ‘pattern spam’ which is where they don’t want the wall to look plain, so they spam brush patterns all over the walls to make them have some depth. I don’t like this. It doesn’t look natural. If you want your wall to have some detail/depth, take a look outside the human base in Karith. Godmil has made some great, natural looking, detailed walls that are neither an eyesore nor intrusive.
So, this is the wall I shall make.
1a) I copied the wall from my base into a new GTK. You may have noticed that I also copied the floor connecting to it. I did this so I have some reference material so the wall will fit in naturally to the floor. Fig1a

1b) I cut the wall into 3 areas. I always do this just to give my wall some basic depth, and so I have some room to add things into the wall. If I don’t like it, I can always change it later. Fig1b

1c) This is what I have come up with so far. Being in a more ‘human hospitable’ area,  I have made the wall smooth out by adding the angled brushes. I used the Karith blue e8 textures so far, as they are part of a nice texture set that can make my wall look natural, rather than wild with various texture sets and colours. I don’t have to keep these textures but it shall do for my basic layout until I add more detail into them. Fig1c

1d) After adding two more cuts into the wall, and adding another simple texture to break the wall up a bit, I now have a simple, clean wall. I paste it back into my main map, and copy/paste it back around the map. How do I join the walls back up? You may ask. It is very simple.
a)   Copy the two walls you want to join, and place them next to each other.

b)   Select a wall and using clipper, cut the wall at a 45 degree angle

c)   Do the same for the other wall


And viola! Two seamless walls joined together. I highlighted in red some of the points on my main map where I used these seamless joints. You should do this for all walls as it saves vertices (points you computer has to process) and makes walls mesh seamlessly into each other.
This is the final result so far.


I have intentionally left out the middle wall for another section, but as you can see we have a nice simple layout to work with, that doesn’t look too bad so far!
Points/notes to take away:
A)   Play around with your wall early on and experiment with different textures to get a ‘feel’ for the wall and its place in your map
B)   Don’t be upset if it doesn’t look AWESOME right now, you can change it later on.
C)   The walls aren’t finished until the roof is! Which is part c
The Roof.

[Plague Bringer]

Press "P" in GTKR and look around the preferences. You'll find that there's a setting to automatically use the caulk texture on all new brushes, as well as a setting to make all faces created by the clipper tool caulked.

[amz181]

Very nice tut

[CreatureofHell]

It doesn't really seem like a tutorial, it's more like "How nubcake makes maps". There are some hints and basic techniques as far as I can see.

[nubcake]

Its a walkthrough of how I make my maps, as I said at the start its designed for people who want to add more detail/realism to there maps so I show what processes I go through to do that.

[Plague Bringer]

Tell the truth, I'd love to know how more mappers do what they do. It's useful, and if not that, interesting.

[UniqPhoeniX]

A nice start for a tutorial. Some things to point out tho:
First screenshots:
Thinner walls: 16gu is enough, and once map is more finished, will give you more space between rooms. It is not necessary on all maps, but after having cleaned up blackout, I highly recommend it. Also you haven't made all the wall corners properly, adding some unnecessary vertices.
Detailing the floors:
What you did, either creates extra vertices (and thus more polygons per surface) to walls where there normally wouldn't be any, or causes 'sparklies'. You should fit the floor pieces to match wall corners. B) "light leaks" are usually referred to as light bleeding, and this is a very common beginner error.
(About the 2 options for automatically using caulk, IIRC 1 of those options is only in NetRadiant, which you should be using.)

[nubcake]

Part 3 – Roof
By now I have a pretty good expectation of how my room will look. The roof is very often overlooked in tremulous maps yet it is a great place for aliens to hide, and in my opinion make tremulous truly ‘3d’.
Most often it is not important to have a greatly detailed roof, as in reality there are very few roofs in real life that are. But making the roof height vary is important. It happens in real life, and is the difference from a monotonous wolfenstein 3d roof and a modern 3d game roof.

A)   And So, I begin the roof stage similarly to the floor stage, but instead of taking it out piece by piece, I first start making the height differences like so:



B)   Then I finish off some of the major details of the base



So now I have basically the whole outline of my base minus the details.
Now I can start working on the actual roof itself. To suit the room, the roof should like nice and clear of pipes, and other mess, as it is a formal area. However it should also look reasonably attractive and 3d. So I will just cut the roof into some nice shapes to give the room a 3rd dimension.
As always, take the roof into another GTK, and do as I have done for the walls and floor. I have also finished off my middle wall which will become a ‘hub’ for navigation and will also make an excellent spot to put an overmind.



So this is my hallway roof piece



As you can see it fits in nicely with the rest of the walls and doesn’t have that box shape.



 As I continue on with the rest of my room, you can see I have continued to maintain consistency with my roof shaping and texturing.



Not too bad! Still a long way to go but the room is coming along nicely. A bit bland, but at least it isn’t boxy! Adding a few lights, this is how it looks when rendered.



It’s looking a bit bland but now I have a room layout, we can change all that. It’s time for the big one, details!

Points/notes to take away:
* Make sure your roof has varying heights, It is what defines 3d.
* You CAN add detail as you go along, for the sake of this tutorial I have broken it down into 4 steps, but I usually add wall detail as I go along, it saves time and keeps motivation high, so you don’t have to go over the map adding detail.

Part 4 - Detail

[CreatureofHell]

(About the 2 options for automatically using caulk, IIRC 1 of those options is only in NetRadiant, which you should be using.)

[nubcake]

saving for part4

[red*kitty]

were can i get that application to make  those models?

[nubcake]

The models )of the OM, tubes etc) come built in to Tremulous. The program I used to make the map was GTKRadiant, although you can use NetRadiant. Nothing in the map other than the buildables are models, but I think you can make md3 models with blender, 3d max with exporters etc