What's the most efficient way to lay down say, a road texture? I thought the overlay tool would be the best, but after I lay down a few road squares, and select the faces to assign it to, it seems to unassign itself to anything after I run the game and go back into it. It also seems quite a labourious task. Is there an easier way? Too bad you couldn't paint them on.

I wish Hammer was open to allow for plugin development. I could think of a hundred useful plugins for us mappers.

Use displacements on your road brushes, and just change the alpha to add some dirt, gravel, etc. where the road would be. It's alot easier, and looks a little nicer.

Check out the dod_flash .vmf file that came with your SDK, it should give you a good idea on how to make convincing roads using overlays.

Good luck :)

Use displacements on your road brushes, and just change the alpha to add some dirt, gravel, etc. where the road would be.

Ok I'm not sure I'm following you there. My terrain is displaced and I'm using a skytrees texture...when I use the paint alpha tool it will only go through the 4 steps of that, being grass to small pine trees...Are you saying I can also paint dirt on top of that, or do I have to use a different texture that has alpha dirt already in it?

Oh you mentioned "road brushes", is that normally how people add detail like that? A separate brush for the road? I didn't know that bit.

Basically make a displacement brush say 256 wide by 512 long, chuck a grass/dirt texture on it and using alpha blending mkae a straight 'road' down the middle of it, this is a cheap way of doing it. Then once you've done that grab an overlay used for roads ie something like the gravel overlay I think it is and use that :)

First off, you don't wanna use the texture with the little pine trees. Unless it's for a skybox, it'll look like complete crap down to player scale (see my dod_foucarville thread, the first screenshot for an example of this).

You'll just have to paint dirt or gravel as the road, whichever your blend texture may be.

"Road Brushes" = the brushes that you have designated as being for roads.. I should have rephrased that :)

Actually some of those skytree textures don't look that bad..like "argenta_skygrasstrees" for example..and the Flash one is decent too...my map is a nature/outdoors map so I want litter it with bush/trees etc.

so all im doing is just using one of those and painting an alpha dirt trail and then using a cobblestone road overlay. :)

thanks

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The best way is to use overlays, you simply place one down and while your still in the overlay tool mode you can move around the corner anchor points in the 3d view and scale the whole thing in the 2d view just like any other brush

Simply lay down one overlay with a material from either the OVERLAYS or DECALS material set (there is a good one in the OVERLAYS set for dirt roads) for each straight away and pull it's corners to match up with the other connecting overlays and set the END perams for each one to scale them correctly after manipulating their corners

Also remember that when selecting the brush faces for the overlays you can hold CTRL while clicking the faces to add more then 1 and you should only have faces selected that are being covered by the overlay

This sounds time consuming but its very simple and quick once you get it down, you can also use a simple blended material on your displacement but it usually will not look as nice as if you use a blended texture in conjunction with overlays

Ahhh!! That sounds more like it. See now what I was doing (insert laugh here) is laying down an overlay for every piece of road! So I had tons of overlays in a row to make a road..I didn't know you could just lay down one and stretch the hell out of it and then correctly map a texture on it...thanks!

...Erm..ok wait, that doesn't look like it'll work as I can't get an overlay texture to tile when you stretch the hell out of it.