Doom3world

**This is for more semi-advanced.. still trying to get out of beginner mapping stage. **

Tired of good old Caulk being just to Pink? or how about the messy textures around your map that just dont seem to "fit"! Well, this tutorial here will show you how to manipulate your texture so that everything fits like a Lego.

Well first of course you want your brush to be textured in full Caulk, now ur probably thinking, which face (A face is the plane of a brush, plane = a side, there being a total of 6 with every normal brush) will be showing in my level. Once you have this part decided, Press CRTL + SHIFT and LMB on the face you want to texture. Notice a pink overlay of the face you selected, and not the whole entire brush. Now find a texture you like and double click so it is applied to the face. You most likely have something that doesnt look right at all. Not aligned and just looks mis-porptioned.


Now here is the not so tricky part, Press "S" to bring up your surface inspector.

The inspector lets you "fit" the texture to the face, that you have selected.
The inspector also has options like Shift Horizontally and Vertically, what this does is move the texture up, down, left and right. The defualt is 0.5 which is a bit much, so I tend to lower it to 0.1 or lower to get the desired effect.

Below that is Scale Horizontally and Vertically, this allows you make the texture bigger or smaller default being 1.

Say you messed up manipulating the texture and you want to start over.. just click the "Natural" button and will bring you right back. Flip X and Flip Y can speak for themselves.

Well thats all for now till I figure out more of it and its purposes... And if you already know please post it here

I was just thinking of making a tip post of this as well since it took me a few days to figure out why I couldn't get my textures to move right...I would type in a number in the surface inspector but I wouldn't see a change. So I started playing with it and found out you once you put in a number for say verticle 0.01 you can use the up/down arrow keys or the scroll mouse to make the acutally adjustment. Doh ... i'm such an idot....

You can shift textures pressing SHIFT + (LEFT cursor) to shift left, SHIFT + (UP cursor) to shift up and so on.

Greetings.

CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+Left click lets you select multiple faces at once, very handy .

Scaling a texture works. You enter a number (default is 1, and will have no effect) and hit Enter. Fractions scale the texture up. Whole numbers scale the texture down. However, where scaling worked in engines such as Half-Life, it is much less likely to work in Doom 3 because you're effectively scaling not one, but three textures. Light's interaction with a scaled texture just looks wrong in 99% of cases I've experimented with.

CRTL + N = naturalize the texture's alignment.

CRTL + I while selecting a patch = invert the textured side.

Does anyone have tips for using "subdivide patch" in the Surface Inspector?

You are a champion!

Alright, for some reason I needed it spelled out to me. I knew about the surface inspector and used it frequently. But your explination actually enlightened me to '0.5' being an increment. Thanks for spelling it out for me, the textures in my maps will be much prettier this time around.

To make a patch take on the texture and texture properties of a brush (alignment, x/y tiling, rotation, etc), select the patch with shift-left click, then hold alt and then middle click on the brush you want to pull the texture properties from.

Those texturing shortcuts can be very handy, especially if you use the same textures all over the place *grins* : (so I genuinely wonder if pro mappers use this a lot ... )

Preview Window

Set Current Texture : Middle Click

This grabs the texture from the preview window.

If any brush(es)/face(s) were selected, they will receive the texture.

Paste Texture to whole brush : Control + Middle Click (doesnt work on patches)

This copies over the texture scaling.

Paste Texture to single face : Shift + Middle Click

This one does NOT seem to copy over the properties, only the texture.

Alignment of texture does not seem to be copied over either way, it seems to always align to the grid.

@JustinBailey: after testing in DoomEdit I can not see a difference between Alt + Middle CLick and just Middle Click.

This tip is more from Q3A and Q2 times, but the easiest way to align textures, is not to align them at all

If you turn off the texture lock Shift+T (movement) and Shift+R (rotation), then start using brush building blocks (e.g. walls in multiples of 128 units, depends on texture size). When moving the wall you will notice how (after moving the wall a bit on grid) at one point the texture fits perfectly. This sounds a bit more complidated that it is, but you should get the idea.

The advantage of turning off texture lock and using the "natural" alignment is this. When you i.e. use many concrete textures to define your designs, it can be a huge pain having to keep track that every texture is properly aligned. Plus when mixing textures on brushes with those on bevels you can simply hit "CAP" to perfectly align the texture to that bevel.

In D3 with lots of trims and edges and other details this may be less helpful, i.e. if you have put together a perfectly textured object, i.e. stairs, it will probably indeed be easier to turn on texture lock (Shift+T) to preserve aligment, when cloning that object for use elsewhere.


Great Alt + middle-click tip, to grab properties from a brush face for a patch. That is a new one on me

@def46:

thanks for the middle click to grab the properties from another brush tip. This is like the old right-click thing from worldcraft and ive been trying for ages to figure out how to do it in D3 - was trying to align two bits of concrete that look unnatural when out of alignment but have no clear reference point to check if they are nearly there or not.

thanks

ubiquitous

I don't know what I'm doing wrong when trying to fit textures to bevels, but it always seems as though the texture comes out "stretched" somehow.

If I try and make a rounded corner, for example, I can align the texture on the bevel to the textures of one of the brushes, but if the bevel is too large, the texture seems to come out stretched!

I'll try and post some screens later, it's difficult to explain in words what's wrong...

OnlyOneKenobi,
This has and is a problem ever since Q3A. Most of the time you will want to use the Surface Inspector (Shift+S) and then pick Natural (Ctrl+N) to make it look right on the bevel. Use Cap for the endcaps obviously.

The problem you probably are having is the transition wall / bevel / wall and all in the same texture. One trick is to use different textures and then place some trim brushes on the transition areas.

Another trick you my want to try is to caulk texture your walls, then place a simple patch mesh on both sides of the bevel (i.e. on the walls) and then join them (possible in GTKradiant, I have no idea is joining patches in possible in D3Radiant).

Or create a 7x3 simple patch mesh, and turn it into wall, bend the "middle" mesh into a bevel and then wall again (all that in Vertex mode (V-key)). This patch would then have *one* properly placed texture on it, via Natural alignement.

I've noticed the bevel problem in Q3 engine games as well. I always managed to find some sort of workaround, like you suggested- doing different textures, but it doesn't seem to work right for this paticular map...I want walls where the scale of the texture on the curves and the straight parts match, without the texture inside the curve being stretched or squashed... I was going to try the patch mesh thing you suggested but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Normally I would use natural alignment for this but I've scaled down the texture sizes on the brushes, so if I do that, the size of the texture on the brush and the bevel don't match...

How can I select faces on a square cylinder to texture them seperatly?

When I press shift + ctrl + left mouse it only seems to select parts of the bounding box and doesn´t let me texture faces individually.

In Quake3 I used "ungroup entity" as a workaround, so I could select parts of a curved construction seperatly. But this doesn´t seem to work also in Doom3.

You can't do that if you're talking about a 'classic' square cylinder, i.e. a cylinder that just happens to be square, as it's all one object, it's not composed of separate faces (except the end caps). If you still need the curvature of the mesh (I assume that's why you're using a square cylinder) then you'll need to make the thing from separate flat meshes if you want a differnt texture on each (or only one) face.

I see, looks if I have to learn how to use patch meshes properly. I find it a bit tricky because they often don´t align properly and I have to switch to the smallest grid unit to fix those little gaps.

Shift (or CtrL) +G is your friend.

In vertex manipulation mode ('V' toggles in/out) just mouse drag and select all the control points and then hit +G combo, that'll snap everything to the grid.

That ctrl + g function is very useful indeed! You learn something new every day

BTW, since we are talking about curved surfaces: is it still required to cover curves with common/caulk from the back side, like in Q3?

In a word 'yes', but simply to seal the hull. I don't know if the old Q3 'z-fighting' problem is an issue any more?.