how can i avoid under or over scaling my map. sometimes when i get started, i make place holders with just plain cubes. then i start making sctructures, then realize they are too big. is tehre a certain size structures should be? should i just wing it with a prop as reference?

thanks.

Originally posted by modifiedgaming.net
should i just wing it with a prop as reference?


Yes, any Door Prop will do. Also, try to reference to a player entity.
I, for one, don't use references anymore simply because you eventually get used to the height of things in Hammer. Using anywhere between 120 and 150 units for 1 floor (as in, the height of the floor from floor to ceiling) is good.

And by the way, 1 unit in hammer is equal to 1 inch in real life, that's also a good way to go about scaling stuff.

i normally place an info_player_start, info_player_axis, or info player_allie for the reference

i normally make the space between floor and ceiling 128, seeing as most textures are scaled to that, i figured it would be a good size to make my walls :)

also if you want texture to fit perfectly then aim for wall of 128 units.

This make less stress on the engine to draw the texture, and any thing in the power of 2 is always better. But map make it so it's not always what we want. But no reason to not used this height on wall for most regular building.

A sample wall with a door frame would have a wall 128 unit high and a 20 unit Height X 60 unit wide to go on top of your door frame.

Windows, I beleive you have 2 different height in the model, one of them will fit nicely if you do a brush 32 high X 36 wide on the bottom and same thing on the top. The window model that fit with this is inset_windowframe_small3_broken.mdl so the large one will need tweeking in height.

If you make a second floor, 8 unit for the floor is more then enough. Usually the frist floor lie under the 128 unit walls and can be used to make some kind of foudation to the buiding.

Wall tickness for house, 16 unit is the base. If you do bunker you want to go with 32 units so it stop even the sniper and MG bullets.

So when ever you can work with 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 go with those since it will help map FPS, if you stick most of the time with such value. But that should not be always the case. Just a good habit when starting mapping to have in mind that a computer work at the power of two and anything ousite that range will ask for more calculation. Also the default sixe of texture are 0.25 for both X and Y and are made to fit perfectly on 128 height brush so easier for the engine to draw since the scaling is perfect.