So I'm trying to learn Hammer and mapping - there's a lot. Its kinda making my head hurt. But following the various tuts, I started making landscapes with displacements and what not, and I noticed the texture scale didn't seem quite right, very small. The default was set at 0.25 so I changed it to 1.00. Now I starting making buildings, 512x256 size. Now the texture scale at 1 on the buildings gig-normous. Changing back to 0.25 makes it look some what right. Where and how do you use what scale or is always 1/4?

Cheers

the default texture scale is .25, and its pretty important to try and stick to it.

Although it may look small, it was designed so that many things stay in proportion to the player.

Definately stick with the default as much as possible.

Take this for example - 1 typical story in the HL2 universe is 128 units high. When you scale a 512x512 texture to .25 - your making it effectively fit 128x128 square areas, perfectly fitting 1 story high structures, without any vertical repitions in the texture.

This is why I try to get my brushwork to be as close to divisions of 8 or 16 as possible, things just fit together much better.

yeah, you need to learn general sizes of things.....

0.25 texture scale is where its at.

128units high is the default height of a wall, 16 units wide etc....

These are all values mappers come to live with as a guide on howto scale things to meet the sizes they want.

Texture filter "dev" that will show you a lof of measurement textures that you can use to obtain various sizes... If you have cs:s id check out de_cbbl vmf which comes wiht it... I find it to be a better example because its actually easier to play that map than to load up a hl2 one and not be able to move around freely.

Thanks for the replies. Found the CS cbble example, very helpful. Since I haven't looked at making textures, I'm gonna make a stab at the logic of 1/4 scale. What is really needed 128x128 textures, i.e. 512/4 (quarter scale) is 128. I guess that its easier to add the needed detail at 512 and then to scale it down to 128. Thanks for the help guys.