Creating A Tunnel System

alienchickenpie

I am making a map that includes a tunnel system that has several hight levels and goes on and under the ground. I tried carving each room and passage seperately in a big box, and it is a leaking, ugly mess. Do you know any tunneling techniques?

Nemesis_Zero

First, <b>never use carve</b>. Otherwise, you'll <i>always</i> get an ugly ugly mess.

The best way of making natural tunnels is to me the 'triangle' method:
- Create four brushes, one for the ceiling, one for the floor, two for the walls.
- Clip each of these brushes into multiple smaller blocks of the same size. I like using blocks with 128x64 units for this method. Make sure that each side (floor, ceiling, walls) consists of at least three times three blocks.
- Clip each block into two wedges. Make sure that the 'trinagular' parts of the wedges face into the space of the corridor.
- You can now use vertex manipulation and drag points at which the brushes are hitting to make it look like real rock/earth. Add a good texture (check Fams v_wad), and it looks like a real tunnel.

alienchickenpie

It's not supposed to be a tunnel, it's more like a trench or an underground concrete corridor. It needs to be straight and smooth. Any ideas about that? 2 more things
How do I measure in units without startting to mess with the grid?
Where can I find nice tutorials about triggers and doors?

Nemesis_Zero

Ah. In that case, I suggest you check the <a href='http://collective.valve-erc.com' target='_blank'>Verc Collective</a>. They should have all tutorials you need to get this started.

Ollj

Tetraeder own. (this solids with 4 vertexes)
You can vertex manipulate them like crazy and they never cause an invalid solid brush (as long as they are not turned inside out).
Placing the 4th vertex ot each tetraeder in the void while the other 3 verteces build the one visible face:
ok since the HL engine and NS likes flat grounds use this tecnique:

1) First just build the bottom ground out of cubes slightly vertex edited. (you can change the cave later easily but changing the bottom of this later is dificoult.
2) Then add more flad triangles to make the bottom less boxy.
3) On every border add 1 or more triangles that touches the bottom-border with one of their triangle-borders and give that triangles a height.
4) now add another group of triangles connecting the first triangles (2 free borders of the old triangles get connected by 2 borders of the new triangles.
5) continue 3 and 4 till the triangles of the left and right wall meet on the ceeling.

the lower picture shows:
dark = lower level
1st) line_ top down view. (peeled open)
2nd) 3d perspective (not visible face parts deleted)
3rd) side view of a cave shape showing angles to make it look round! 5-7 borders are nice. 8-9 are much.
ALL not bottom vertexes can now moved around without causing leaks)

when you finished this kind of tunnel xou can vertex edit it like you want (just not the bottom) without getting leaks and invalid brushed too fast.

+ + +:
looks realistic, is lowpoly and is easy to edit.
its clean brushwork.
- - -:
If the faces of each visible triangle are not that planar too each other you get LOTS (!!!) of planes (no problem since XP-tools) and LOTS of leafes and leaf portals saw into leafes.

To avoid the disadvantages make lots of 2 visible neighbour triangles planar (in the same face) and unify them by transforming them into one pyramid shaped brush (5 vertexes, square surface visible)

I did some of that in ns_complex (dl in my sig) especially in the mother hive.

alienchickenpie

Is needs to be boxy. It's an underground corridor that connects two bunkers. I'll try building the whole corridors and bunker thing out of boxes, make a flat brush for the ground, submerge it into the ground and carve the flat ground brush. There are better, faster, more efficient ways, but I'll use this one.

Ollj

Another way of caves is the "worm method"
This does not cause leaf portal saw into leafes that fast but looks more square at the beginning.
This method just works on more or less straight parts of cave-paths and not in curves.

- First build your side view tunnel shape. the sides and the bottom should be surrounded by a thic wall.
- then you copy this shape serveral times (with differend depth stretch)
- now you can move eeach row (marked wed) into ANY directoin you want without causing leaks and invalid brushes) as long as you aLWAYS move A COMPLETE ROW AT ONCE.
- Now you can make the brushwork cleaner by removing some planes in the void by the carve tool making the solid wall thinner and changing all brushes into 6 vertex-brushes (ramps)
- To make the cave less square add sone solid brushes (tetraeder) in the inner corners of the cave.

1st row: side view.
2nd row: top down view.