How to 'hide' entities on a rooftop

[terrorist_hell]

The yellow boxes all represent toxic barrels. My goal on this testmap is too use hintbrushes, areaportels, occluders, etc. I managed to use hintbrushes (like a triangle in a corner), you can see little of it in the right corner. An areaportal is used in the doorway (in the building are dozens of barrels that should respresent 'hard to render' material. All in all, this works fine, but how do stop the engine from rendering the barrels on top? And if I'm on the building (say like rocketjumping), how do I stop the barrels on the ground from being rendered if I can't see them?

Oh, and just to say, I do not want to use walls or anything like that, I just like to know if this thing is possible or not. Here's a birdeye perspective:

[YM]

try a diagonal hint brush that runs at 45 degrees from horizontal along the edge of the building, you could also emmbed an occluder brush in the rim of the ceiling or the wall

[terrorist_hell]

You mean like this? This isn't working, probably I'm wrong. Also with occluder brushes, it put them inside the walls, but I keep getting errors like "Occluder X straddles multiple areas. This is invalid!" I tried to make 'm like the sdk_occluder map, making them smaller to fit inside the wallbrush, but I still get the errors.

[YM]

no not quite like that. keep the diagonal going past the roof and have the hint texture on the diagonal face.

I can't give adcive about occluders, I've actually never used them

[Gadget]

could you provide the vmf file, please? I'd like to give it a try by using hints and occluders.

[grazr]

If the occluder is between the players view and model origin, the model is not rendered. However occluders work in real time for this; and the larger the occluder the more memory is required to do the math etc etc. Occluders are generally bad for multiplayer maps and should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances, as occluders will normally add more load to your system than lower it. They are good for sticking behind displacements, though a simple wall and vertical hint brush would do as much and require less effert from your computer.

If you can't get the hint brush to work you should read more articles to understand the concept rather than just having someone tell you how to set it up ingame. I don't mean to sound derogatory, this is after all an advanced piece of the level design process. If you understood the concept of the hint brush you would have been able to figure this out for yourself. That's not meant to be an insult, i'm just saying you might want to read more/a better article on hint brushes than what you may have already.

Then you can apply them to more complicated scenario's, which inevitably will be the case for a sophisticated map.

[terrorist_hell]

Link to testmap.vmf

[terrorist_hell]

Has anyone figured this out yet? I do understand hint brushes, just not sure if that's what I need here. Please don't be so all knowing by saying " you 'll never know if don't understand it ". That's just mean

[Gadget]

well actually I was able to hide most of the barrels with only hint brushes (24 of 36) BUT I think this area is so small that it doesn't make sense to optimise anything. Using hints also creates more visleafs than necessary which is not the best solution for performance. If you really want to hide all of them you need to make the building higher or add some little wall around the edges in combination with hints. If you want to use occluders you would need 4 of them but I wouldn't advise doing that. Another try: use prop fade distance.

oh and here's one thing I noticed: the hint brush you placed at the corner wasn't working as supposed so I fixed that.

vmf and bsp

[Altaco]

As a sidenote, why have a bunch of entities up there? The player will never see em.