Hi,
I want to make a trecnh it a u type hspae into the base of my map, could someone point me in the direction of a tutorial or give me an idea of how to do this.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks ;)

just either:

clip the area that you want to be a trench, and build a trench like u shabed box below the ground

or if you dont want to clip then just resize teh ground texture and run it all the way up to where you want the trench to be. i think that once you try it youll find its quite easy

clip the area that you want to be a trench, and build a trench like u shabed box below the ground

uhhh ARE YOU INSANE??? CLIPPING TRENCHES IN THE GROUND IS A DEATH SENTANCE. YOU WILL GO TO HELL!!! not really, but its a bad bad bad idea. Do it manually instead with teh vertex tool. Trust me, I learned the hard way. It will save you hours in the long run.

So use the second method.

I was trying vertex manipulation but it kept on cause invalid structures and the faces on some of the brushes kept going missing. Anyone know how to avoid this?

Dude, your sig is way too big...

I am still pretty noob to mapping but my guess is that creating trenches won't be that different from the stuff that is being explained in this tutorial ...

craters and rubble (http://www.dodmappers.com/http/tutorials.php?opt=shw_tut&tutnam=craters%20and%20rubble)

... this link is right up in the FAQ with the stickie in the top of this Forum

I'm not sure what one would find so complicated about making trenches, it's easier than a house. 2 sides, 1 ground = 3 brushes.

Anyways, here's pic of a trench I made that surrounds a bunker. Several views of it, so maybe you can get a good idea how I did it.

Well most of these guys really dont know what they are talking about

If you are going to make a u shaped trench then using the clip tool is a must if you want to keep the brushwork optimized

I can send you an example map if you would like

http://www.dodstudios.net/uploads/uploads/Trench.jpg

You want something like this right ?

Basically just draw the sdies of the trench as individual brushes, if you want ot it to curve or somethin use the rotation and clipping tools. if it dosnt fit perfectly then you vertex manipulate it. with vertex manipulation its a tricky process, you need to make sure all the vertecies of a face are on the same 3D plane. Its impossible for 3 vertecies to be on a different 3D plane if your having trouble make your brushes triangles.

Originally posted by Angry Beaver
Basically just draw the sdies of the trench as individual brushes, if you want ot it to curve or somethin use the rotation and clipping tools. if it dosnt fit perfectly then you vertex manipulate it. with vertex manipulation its a tricky process, you need to make sure all the vertecies of a face are on the same 3D plane. Its impossible for 3 vertecies to be on a different 3D plane if your having trouble make your brushes triangles.

Do not use rotation . . .

Use clipping and vertex manip

Then when you are done making and joining all of the brushes seect all of them then go into the texture properties with all of them selected and check ALLIGN TO FACE then ALLIGN TO WORLD this will reset the face properties and allow for texture alignment on manipulated brushes that had reversed planes

Originally posted by ender
I'm not sure what one would find so complicated about making trenches, it's easier than a house. 2 sides, 1 ground = 3 brushes.

Anyways, here's pic of a trench I made that surrounds a bunker. Several views of it, so maybe you can get a good idea how I did it.

I was thinking more along the lines of a ditch whith curved sides and bumpy pathway, possible just made out of sand and gravel rather than those trenches with wooden wall supports.

Thanks everyone for the advice, thanks escpecially NC17, I never knew about reseting the face properties, and for some reason it never crossed my mind to use the clipping tool. You talk about revesed planes. Could someone explain how to avoid this, becuase I just know it will be the cause of some of most of my errors.

Originally posted by stealth
I was thinking more along the lines of a ditch whith curved sides and bumpy pathway, possible just made out of sand and gravel rather than those trenches with wooden wall supports.

Use the triangle/terrain method then. Just a bunch of triangles that are vertex manipulated.

Originally posted by NC17
Do not use rotation . . .

I use rotation all the time, but If youd of read my post properly youd of noticed I vertex edited to brush right after so it was on grid units. then of course you need to realgin textures, but if they are algined to face its not that much of an issue.

Originally posted by stealth
I was thinking more along the lines of a ditch whith curved sides and bumpy pathway, possible just made out of sand and gravel rather than those trenches with wooden wall supports.

Thanks everyone for the advice, thanks escpecially NC17, I never knew about reseting the face properties, and for some reason it never crossed my mind to use the clipping tool. You talk about revesed planes. Could someone explain how to avoid this, becuase I just know it will be the cause of some of most of my errors.

Well when you transform a brush, especially vertex editing, you can take the brush' faces out of their default face plane which will cause the textures to not properly allign

The way to tell if the any of the brush' faces are off of their default plane is to select the brush then go into the texture properties, if the ALLIGN TO WORLD and the ALLIGN TO FACE check marks are both faded then the faces need to be reset

If I were to manipulate a bunch of brushes to build some fancy trenches with the vertex tool...and I ended up with a bunch of leaks....align textures to world and align to face will automatically close them up?

I ask because I had this little leak in a map I was making, I clipped and then vertexed it to try and make the ground uneven and more interesting, well I ended up with a leak that no amount of realigning seemed to fix.

Deleting the whole brush and just using clipping (a lot) produced similiar results with a lot more work but no leaks.

So just having things automatically realign would have fixed it?

??

thanks

From what I know textures can never cause a leak, thus it has nothing to do with the alignment of the texture.

My best guess is that you have made a hole when you manipulated some of you brushes, so have another look at them, load up the pointfile in hammer to se if it gives any clue where the problem is and if nothing other helps, start boxing in parts of the map to find the leak.

Texture alignment has nothing to do with leaks leaks depend only on brushwork

Yeah, for some reason I was thinking brushes....
Yes, there was a tiny crack between 2 textures and hammer kept pointing to info_axis_spawn which was clearly not leaking and was on the opposite side of hte map.

I knew where the leak was, but even overlapping the brushes never fixed it.

I wish there was a command to automatically close up leaks!

One off topic question.
In hammer I can't find a rotate object button.

The reason I ask is that I made some guard towers and I wanted to make copies of them, which was easy, but I wanted to rotate them 90 degrees so that they made more sense instead of the ladders on some tower were on the outside of the fort.

I had to edit and move them all manually, there an easier way?

Select it and hit ctrl + M ... its one of the most usable tools in the editor :)

I made a movie tut for trenchs/bunkers/terrain. Ill post it here later.