Vertex editing problems.

[apocguy]

Lately I have been having a huge problem with vertex editing. I can use the tool and everything goes fine and dandy. But when I close hammer and come back later, everything gets corrupted and warped.

For some reason the elevations of my brushes change, as do their angle. Sometimes they will also has portions cut off.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v181/ZkM2009/mapping/normal.jpg

Here is what it looks like before I close hammer. This is essentially what I want.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v181/ZkM2009/mapping/broken.jpg

This is what I get when I open hammer. Things are in odd places and at odd angles, and some brushes get cut.


This is a real sore in my side. I wish my brushes weren't glitching. I'm eventually going to turn those brushes into displacements and have a really smooth hill.

[Tigger]

You probably have a concave edge on a face. Where one point on an edge is farther in than its neighbors. That's what happens to me when I have a concave edge. I end up spitting the face at the point I want it to poke in. That way I only have convex edges on my faces and they don't load funny.

[apocguy]

Sorry but I dont really under stand what you mean. Could you show me a photo?

[FaTony]

All vertexes of 1 face must be on the same plane. While 3 vertexes always does, 4 sometimes doesn't. Try to fix ur problem with clipping tool.

[Uriak]

As said above, vertex edited shapes must be convex since Hammer stores faces and not vertices. If your shape needs a concave zone, you have to split it in severals brushes.

However, hammer sometimes screws up convex brushes. therefore, complex settings should be created with simple elemental brushes. Using vertex editing for making prism shaped brushes, or truncated pyramids is fine.

In your case, you should even consider using displacements.

[Laz]

for what Im seeing in that picture, I'd definitly use displacements.
but your problem is probably that all your points from one face are not on the same plane. either use triangles, or just displace it :)

[Youme]

yeah, the top picture half your brushes arent valid, you can't possibly make the shape you want like that (its impossible if you want to make them displacements afterwards that is, if you don't just gut the brushes into trianglesand do that, then its 10000x harder to make them invalid - this is how displacements were done in the good old days)

I'd just use a few flat brushes at the botom level and discplace them all to give the height, if you look at the little cliff in lumberyard after turning off displacements, its 100% flat.

[Laz]

displace it from one big brush. its just a little hill.

youme you just made me remember the agony of creating displacements by having a bunch of triangular columns right next to each other, then vertex editing each vertex one by one.

[Tigger]

Ok... here's the pics I promised of what's happening, super simple like...

I made an arch, and cornered up it's top edges...

http://pics.livejournal.com/hmace/pic/00014tz1

I wanted a smoother curve so I went in and added a point to one of the brushes

http://pics.livejournal.com/hmace/pic/00015z5c

And I moved the point in toward the center of the brush

http://pics.livejournal.com/hmace/pic/00016zxb

OMG! Now I have a concave solid! Oh Noes! It doesn't save right, and can cause hammer to crash!

http://pics.livejournal.com/hmace/pic/00019gc8

So... you select two points on the face, one of them being the offending point, Press Ctr+F, and voila! Your bad face is now split into two faces, neither concave.

http://pics.livejournal.com/hmace/pic/00018bth

FYI... you have to select just two points... if you select the points in the view I was showing, you'll be selecting two points at a time with one click. You need to go to the top down view in this case to select the proper points.

Here endith the lesson.