Ok I am lost as to how to create houses which you can enter by using the brush. Is there a tutorial out there somewhere?

How do I build the stock houses that I see the texture maps for?

Also the entity prop houses are really small and don't show up in the game.

I think I need a tut'.

cheers

I know the following tutorial will seem very rude, but I'm extremely tired... but really, I'm usually a very nice guy.

Ok. A way to make a house from a brush is this:
Make a square brush 8 units thick. This is your floor.
Make 4 square brushes 8 units thick on each side of your "floor" perpendicular to it (your floor). These are you walls.
Make a square brush on top of you 4 brushes, in parallel with your bottom brush 8 units thick. This is your celing/roof.

You now have a very square/cubed house.
--

In short, you make houses by brushing them. There's no way you can just make 1 brush and somehow use a command to turn it into a house. A useable house is typically made up of at least 10 brushes. 7 walls, 1 floor, 1 celing, and 1 roof. 3 brushes that make up 1 wall is to make room for the doorway so you can enter it. In Source, nice houses tend to be made up of at least 30 (or more brushes).

There's no such thing as stock houses. If there were, that'd be a miracle. It would be a Godsend. Seriously. Even if there were, many vet mappers will look down on you if you actually used them and didn't take the time to learn anything from them.
--

The model houses that you've found aren't supposed to be "useable". Those are skybox houses. You know in dod_flash or dod_avalanche there are those houses and areas that you can see "far-off" in the distance, but you can't get to them? It's because those are in the skybox. Once you learn how to use skyboxes, you'll see why those houses are small and don't show up correctly in-game.

To sum it all up, you can't use models or stock houses or magically make a house in 1 second. You have to take the time to brush them. Piece by piece.

I know it's very confusing in the beginning, but you'll get it soon enough.
Good luck!

MUCH appreciated SLD, I will have a go at it then. I know 3D Max, so the very easy way you described the building process shant be a problem at all.

cheers for the help

Originally posted by 3eamus
MUCH appreciated SLD, I will have a go at it then. I know 3D Max, so the very easy way you described the building process shant be a problem at all.

cheers for the help LOL! Well, don't use that process "word for word". Many of the mappers here will give you **** if you just did it that way. Make the houses look real (especially in Source). Make them Architectually sound. Try to make them fitting to the town/area they're in. Fit to the war-time era look.

I just remembered, use the "Search" button and look up "zoo" within the mapping forum here. You'll come up with a thread that some mappers have put together some buildings (mostly bunkers) that they've put together. However, one of those buildings is a house. Study how that house was made. It's a *relatively* good example to study from.

When I say "relatively" I mean that there's some stuff wrong with it. Like it doesn't use the nodraw texture much at all - which is critical for optimization - has some overlapping brushes.... but for you (and many other mappers), it's something to study from.

Whats better 16 unit or 8 unit thick walls? i use 16 but you said 8.

Originally posted by TheMiede
Whats better 16 unit or 8 unit thick walls? i use 16 but you said 8. Well... I think I meant to say 16. But for some reason, 16 *sounded* too thick. So I said 8 instead.

i think 16 is the standard wall thickness. All he doorframe models etc seem to fit best with a wall of 16

16 is the standard, but according to the docomentation for Hammer; 1 unit = 1 inch. 16 inches sounds a little too thick for me (btw: won't someone use the bloody metric system for a change?!)

By stock houses, I think he means the textures name "building_template..."
For these textures, use normaly a height of 128 and width of 256 or 128. Things work better in multipules of 16, in fact textures have to be in multiples of 16 or they can't be made (or 8...?)

xerent made a good tut about it.

Originally posted by Ca-Chicken-Soup
16 is the standard, but according to the docomentation for Hammer; 1 unit = 1 inch. 16 inches sounds a little too thick for me (btw: won't someone use the bloody metric system for a change?!)

By stock houses, I think he means the textures name "building_template..."
For these textures, use normaly a height of 128 and width of 256 or 128. Things work better in multipules of 16, in fact textures have to be in multiples of 16 or they can't be made (or 8...?)

metric > imperial but Valve is in the USA so I guess nothing we can do about that :P



Something you should seriously consider doing would be to decompile dod_donner which has a lot of enterable houses, have a look around and get a feel for things.

I had posted this in an earlier thread, just a basic house idea, not enterable.

http://www.justfungaming.com/es/house.jpg

Yeah, according to the Valve docs, 1 unit = 1 inch. Dunno about how it was in ~1900 - ~1975... but standard exterior wall thickness is 6" (at least it is in my area); Standard interior wall thickness is 4" (using 2x4 and 2x6s).

Metric would be nice, yeah... and it would also be nice if you turned on the "Feet & Inches" option, it would actually give you Feet & Inches instead of nothing :mad:

But yeah, 16 units thick is the standard wall thickness in DOD... my bad.

You were tired ;)

The trick is to think "would this house work in the real world" - from an engineering perspective, would it stand? Would rain water run off of the roof properly, would the gutter catch the water, would the milkman get drenched by a poor drainage system? You get the idea.

Once you've got that you've then got to think about in-game issues such as steps being too steep or floors being too bumpy.

And (perhaps this should probably come first but I'm lazy and leave it to last) you have to think about optimisation, such as using nodraw on brush faces that won't be seen by players.

once you get going with hammer...practice practice practice. That's the best, fastest way to learn when combined with reading tutorials.

It's like if Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker had actually combined their strength they would have likely taken over the Galaxy...but I guess we'll never know.

Anyone else think that 128 tall walls make the ceiling feel a little too low. I think it may have something to do with the player models being taller than I am but ~136 walls feel more natural to me.

Originally posted by eddi.
Anyone else think that 128 tall walls make the ceiling feel a little too low. I think it may have something to do with the player models being taller than I am but ~136 walls feel more natural to me. Well.. in real life, 6" exterior walls is good. 4" for interior walls.

In Hammer, 16 units for walls is good for all walls... and as stated before, "1 unit = 1 inch". But I think it's more correct to say:
1 inch = 2.667 units (I got this from dividing 16 units over 6")

In real life (iirc, that is), standard ceiling height is ~7 feet. That's 84".

So 84" * 2.667 = 224 units (rounding down)

The ceiling height *should* be 224 units from the floor.

Hmmm interesting. It also depends on the building as well though. You'll find that town houses from 19th C have higher ceilings than modern houses - about 3m high (upto around 10 ft) but rural buildings tend to have very low ceilings - about 2m high!

I might just have a go at building ceilings 224 units high, see how they feel. To be honest I only use 128 or 192 simply because they're nicely divisible by 64 units on the grid and it seems about the right height vs the player height in units.

It *is* better to go with the units that are divisable by 8... I just thought that I'd point out "224-unit" as a small sidenote.

Originally posted by izuno
It's like if Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker had actually combined their strength they would have likely taken over the Galaxy...but I guess we'll never know.

I thought that was just a film ?

Just look at it, you can tell how well it will look ingame, jus tuse measurements of 8 and see how it scales visually