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[plsv]

Hello, I have modelled a cave like this:

https://imgur.com/XN4Tuw1

And I'm trying to make brushes from it/import it to hammer. I'm aiming at a medium-high poly environment for eye candy in a goldsrc jump map (we are talking 800-1000 wpolys at most at any given time from a player's perspective)

What I've achieved so far:

Hammer's better but buggy alternative Sledge can import .obj models and convert them to a .map file. I get something like this:

https://imgur.com/6T8GvXC


However every face of the model gets converted to a polyhedron (gets "brushified") regardless if that face is a plane object or a closed cube in the model. And that is a bummer because not only this creates a clipnode nightmare of a map, this kind of architecture won't even build because it leaks everywhere even though I made sure to snap every vertice to the grid (no sub 1 unit positions) and all of the shapes are polyhedrons so there is no possibility of them being deformed. I think it's just because of the polyhedrons having too little height. I'm aware of most of the goldsource limitations and that it's not made for this kind of brushing but I would really love to find a way around it. I could fix this problem with brushing a clip texture over the whole thing to avoid deformed clips and reduce clipnode count but that would take a really long time.

So I was looking into different tools and that brought here. I tried importing a model (.fbx and .dxf), it seems it imports fine into 3ds Max using WallWorm. But when I export it, my exported map is empty.

I have both "filled"

https://imgur.com/XN4Tuw1

and planar

https://imgur.com/DOzmp34

versions of my models and it's all a brush-like structure.

What needs to be done for one of the models to be exported to .map file using WallWorm? Do I need to tag each face of the imported model or something? Maybe it's easy, maybe it's more complicated than I think.

Thanks for help
:)

[wallworm]

Sorry for the late reply.

I am glad to see that you have a good grasp on the problem. This same scenario has been brought to me many times over the years and generally people don't understand the fundamental challenges of doing this in BSP (especially in Goldsource).

When starting with a premade mesh, you are always going to run into a problem with a lot of work needing to be done for this level of complexity. There are three solutions:

• Manually build BSP around sections
• Use ShellVex
• Use V-HACD

Manual Brushes

By manual, I'm not saying completely manual. But you could attempt to use the Hull functions in WW to select sections of your mesh that should collapse to a single brush and use Create Hull From Selected Faces and Hide to go through and make convex brushes as needed. This would take some time and would probably want to apply a Brushify modifier with Snap to Grid setting turned on in the modifier.

Use ShellVex

Shellvex will make a brush for each polygon of the source geometry with functions for snapping to grid, etc. While it will likely be cleaner than the method you mentioned, it will still create one brush per original polygon. It's probably better to use this on carefully designed source geometry than fully sculpted landscapes.

V-HACD

There is a function in Hull Helper to create a convex decomposition of a mesh with V-HACD. This requires a lot of tweaking and testing of the values. It may end up creating geometry too complex for Goldsource brushes, but it may be worth a try. I'd always add a Brushify modifier when done with grid snapping turned on in the modifier.

In all cases, to make an object export as a brush, it needs to be tagged as a brush. In the level design toolbar, it's the icon with brick texture. In the menus it is WW > WW Level Design > Set Selection as Brush Geometry. Note if you have an object that has multiple elements (where each element is a brush) you need to tag it as a concave brush.

Here are a few helpful links:

• Hull Helper
• ShellVex
• Brushify
• Porting Levels into Source

Some info may be out-of-date so don't be afraid to ask for clarification. Hopefully this helps some in your adventure. Please share your journey here.