Start with one room and extrude everything off it or Make multiple rooms and connect them after

Vithar

What is the best way to start a map?
1) Make one room, extrude hallways out of it, extrude new rooms from hallway
2) Make multiple rooms then create hallways to connect them.

I started out by trying method 2, but couldn't connect hallways properly. I was unable to figure out how to cut a hole in my room's wall face to create a doorway.

BeigeAlert

Vithar wrote: »

What is the best way to start a map?
1) Make one room, extrude hallways out of it, extrude new rooms from hallway
2) Make multiple rooms then create hallways to connect them.

I started out by trying method 2, but couldn't connect hallways properly. I was unable to figure out how to cut a hole in my room's wall face to create a doorway.

You can cut holes in faces using the rectangle tool.

I recommend you stick with #2, and resist the temptation to weld everything together!!!. It may seem "neater" to have everything all nice and welded up, but in the long run, this makes it REAAAAALLLY difficult to make any changes to a map.

For example, I'm chopping up maps right now for tutorials (tutorials don't take up the whole map, no reason to load up the entire map!), and docking was a real pleasure to work with. Everything was in nice, contiguous pieces, that I could just double-click, and move. Veil on the other hand... EVERYTHING is welded together, so it's incredibly time-consuming.

Anyways, I highly recommend checking out docking, seeing how he's divided up the map, and left things in logical pieces.

Flaterectomy

I'm on the other end of that spectrum. I hate it when geometry isn't welded together, and find it a lot of work moving non-welded geometry around.

I did a quick video about it just now to illustrate how I'd go about it.

Calego

Alright @Flaterectomy and @BeigeAlert.
You two need to duke it out here and lay out why Welded vs nonwelded is a thing. If both are more conveineint, something ain't right.

Flaterectomy

I suppose it all depends on your chosen workflow. I'll admit that non-welded is often better for performance, as welded geo can increase the number of triangles rendered. So my workflow requires me to do a geo optimization pass afterward. But since I rely heavily on the line tool in the way I work, things need to be welded as I build stuff.

Calego

Flaterectomy wrote: »

I suppose it all depends on your chosen workflow. I'll admit that non-welded is often better for performance, as welded geo can increase the number of triangles rendered. So my workflow requires me to do a geo optimization pass afterward. But since I rely heavily on the line tool in the way I work, things need to be welded as I build stuff.

So in your video, as you extrude out the hallway, everything is welded until you reach the part where you have to remove the two faces right? Doubleclicking on the hallway will include the first room, but not the second?

Soul_Rider

I a big fan of the line tool, I don't trust the extrude or the selection tool on geomtry, even the line tool can be a pain at times.

Flaterectomy

Calego wrote: »

So in your video, as you extrude out the hallway, everything is welded until you reach the part where you have to remove the two faces right? Doubleclicking on the hallway will include the first room, but not the second?

Correct! The second room is not welded to the corridor.

BeigeAlert

There's absolutely no performance impact between welded vs unwelded. The only thing that impacts performance is the number of triangles, and the triangulator only works on a per-face basis, so it doesn't matter if that face is welded to it neighbors or not.

I find that most of my time in spark seems to be spent selecting stuff, and if I can select an entire piece just by double clicking on it, that saves me a ton of time. On veil, for example, I cannot select pieces intelligently, because the entire map is connected. Double click on one thing, and the entire map lights up. Don't do that! lol If you want to save time selecting an entire room, use the layers!

EDIT: RE performance: unless you mean it adds more triangles because you have to add more verts to make everything join up nicely, then yea, that does create more triangles to render, but each triangle there takes up less area, so it's a bit of a toss-up.

Vithar

Good to know that both ways work. I'll try both and see what I like.

And thanks for the video flat, I figured out why I couldn't cut a face out for hallway entrance - I had extruded the hallway up to the room before cutting the face out, so the rectangle tool was selecting the hallway, not the wall.

Flaterectomy

BeigeAlert wrote: »

EDIT: RE performance: unless you mean it adds more triangles because you have to add more verts to make everything join up nicely, then yea, that does create more triangles to render, but each triangle there takes up less area, so it's a bit of a toss-up.

That's what I meant yeah. I should do a test to see the impact of those things though. I never actually dug very deeply into this.

Yojimbo

@Flaterectomy @BeigeAlert You guys should start up a new forum topic sharing your best known tips or handy shortcuts and share your pool of information with all the other mappers so everyone can benefit from it, who knows you might learn something new from the other mappers too!