[GUIDE] Youme's guide to displacement cliffs

[YM]

Due to demand, this is basically me comentating how I would make a cliff, since I don't have fraps or a good quality mic its not in video form.
So I'm gunna brush off my English accent and get started...


So here is the cliff shape we want, well, roughly anyway. I've put in two corners and a tunnel, just to cram pack this with info



One thing we have to sort out pretty early on is how your brushes join. Since we are only using the 'front' face of the brush thats the only one we need, this is important because of the way displacements join together.



Either get out your clipping tool and clip the corners off or use the vertex tool to the same effect, personally I prefer the vertex tool



Because displacements need to match up properly any cuts you make for holes need to run through the whole displacement. See how the yellow lines run right round the corners.



Next we need to texture the whole thing in the nodraw texture, then select the front faces and pick a nice cliff texture. I'm using rockwall006. In this picture its at x scale 0.25 and y scale 0.25. see how it repeats notisably every 256 units.



What we really need to do is stretch it a bit so the repeat is less obvious. I've kept the x scale as 0.25 and upped the y scale to 0.5, if you really want you can go for something higher like 0.75



Next comes aligning the texture, if you keep your brushes neatly on the scale you should only need to adjust the x shift by multiples of 128 (sometimes negative)



Select the front faces only of all the brushes and open the displacement tab create the displacement, I start with power 2 and upres to 4 or 4 if I need.



So now I've actually started the displacement and I start by making the corners neat, one axis only



Now I repeat the process almost exactly for the other axis.



Now comes the main displacement, I select the whole lot together so that I don't get any mismatches. The cliffs i've been doing come in waves, each bit that comes out a lot is sandwiched by a bit that goes in a lot. As a general rule of theumb, the top of the cliff should retreat behind the main section, the bit just under it should come forwards, the very botom should also come out and the lower middle bit should be behind the plane of the original brush. Make sense? hope so, heres another pic (only one axis)



Repeated process for the other axis, you may have noticed by now I tend to work one axis at a time.



Now I start on the tunnel, sides first. I have the whole thing selected to stop missalignments. The top and bottom come in slightly and the middle goes out slightly



With the z axis now, middle go up and down (top and bottom displacement respectively) and the sides come down and up respectively



Now I crunch the front displacement into where the tunnel ends and I crunch the second set of points in the tunnel forwards. Once they are close to each other I select the whole lot and hit that handy 'sew' button



A few last tweaks before sealing the areawith nodraw brushes behind the displacements and skybox brushes elsewhere. You might want to note that displacements don't block vvis so that means you will have to put nodraw brushes behind it to prevent leaks.



And here is the final thing in-game.



Hope this helped, Its now 00:45am so if anything is missing/majorly wrong then I'll ammend it later.


ADDITION(S): The .VMF and .BSP files from this tutorial are here for you to download and examine, I was going to upload these originally, but didn't think people needed them, but it can't hurt for you to have them available.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Youme

The Subdivide button:
Sometimes I feel the urge to use this button, its quite intersting but I rarely keep its results. I select all the faces I want to subdivide and hit CTRL+S (Save) then hit the subdivide button. What it does is it smoothes all your corners out to what it thinks is right, sometimes it gets it spot on, some times it looks horrible. If its horrible I just hit CTRL+Z and shudder before using the normal brush tool. When I made the arch in the earlier screenshot the dubdivide tool was very usefull, I selected all the faces and subdivided them, it did almost all of the work for me. I then only had to go make it a more natural looking shape and tweak the edges.
NB: This button is not for beginners!

ADDITION 3: This tutorial is outdated and in my eyes terrible. I appologise to everyone who has been confused by it, if you find it any easier use this one here, this is the method I currently use for displacements and [I find] much easier.
http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=10287

[Snipergen]

You are awesome. And I read this at 1:58 in the morning lol.

I am so gonna use this since I hate displacements in hammer ^^

[DJive]

A++ and Rep. its great to have a TF2 displacement tutorial. I cant wait to try this when i get home.

edit: Question though, and maybe explained in a part 2 to this..

How do you get realistic looking top parts of the cliff. I always start off with a box.. in the end it looks like a cliff..but in the shape of a box, i can never get the top to look "round"

[Narkissus]

I love you!

[ZargonX]

Excellent write up!

[Milktoast]

Very well done! It's really great that you've taken your time to do this!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Youme

Next we need to texture the whole thing in the nodraw texture, then select the front faces and pick a nice cliff texture. I'm using rockwall006. In this picture its at x scale 0.25 and y scale 0.25. see how it repeats notisably every 256 units.

One very minor simplification: you don't have to texture everything with nodraw first. According to the Valve wiki at http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Displacement:

Quote:

Additionally, if a brush solid contains any displacement surfaces, all of the non-displacement sides are discarded when the map is compiled and run in the engine.

Since it doesn't matter what texture they have, you can skip the extra step of texturing the original brushes with nodraw... just texture everything with your rock texture.

[A Boojum Snark]

Hmm, your brush construction technique is totally different from what I've always done. I don't miter corners as overlaps don't matter since non-disp faces are trashed, and I usually make hole openings with trapezoidal faces.

[Irksome]

Excellent tutorial.

[timberghost_paintball]

Great Tutorial
I converted it to word and pdf files for easy clean printing if its cool with Youme I'll post them in a zip in the download section

[YM]

Oh nice, good idea