- Advantage of Clipping
- Level Introduction
- Final Product
- Excel Template Download
- The Method (Can Skip to Here)
- Final Words
Clipping Tool Trick – Angled Brushwork
Advantage of the Clipping Tool over The Carving Tool
Many people have heard of the age old argument, or perhaps statement of “Never Carve”, and for the most part its true, there are very few situations where its good to use it or more beneficial to be used, but 99% of the time you should be using the Cutting Tool, and to reinforce that there is of course a good mental picture supplied on the left to help make our point in the debate of “Carve or Cut?”
Carving is basic and messy while cutting is precise and clean as you will see in this simple use of the tool. You can use the cutting tool to replicate anything the carving tool can do, but not vice versa, carving has many limitations and many problems associated with it. Poor understanding of the tool by users results in many compile problems and failed maps as a result. It can be attractive to new users that a button will do all the work for you, but learning the more useful tools over the “Quick-Fix” ones are and will always be the better option to go with, you will use the cutting tool in every project you make, regardless of what game it is, its the most used tool to modify your brushes, time to learn how to handle it.
Before you start playing with this cutting trick I would suggest that you first read some other tutorials on the matter, just be sure that they are indeed Cutting Tutorials rather than Carving ones simple misnamed due to not understanding the difference on the part of the author. Also some minor vertex manipulation will be used as well for this trick to work. A few tutorials are available here and can easily be reviewed before continuing this one via the links provided below:
Level Introduction
For this tutorial I’ve been able to borrow a small wall section created by Kosire thats being used in his latest map in development de_vigor that I’ve been helping out on this very subject and will show how I’ve done that within this tutorial along with providing some tools to help improve the speed in which you can complete these calculations.
I won’t be showing his entire map to the world here or anything, just the wall section interests us for the purpose of this tutorial.
Final Product
The above image is what can be done with this angled cutting trick to accurately slice intersecting brushes along an angle leaving no overlapping brushes or gaps in the brushwork. Being able to make interesting looking levels means that one should try to avoid blocky architecture and design, sticking to the grid perfectly in only horizontal and vertical lines makes for rather bland levels not really worth looking at.
What you will be able to do with this tutorial is make an interesting looking wall template such as that on the right I will be using modified from de_vigor – courtesy of Kosire – and use it to make building shapes other than perfect 90 degree corners to allow unique building structures rather than more blocks. This allows you to have more creative freedom and make your maps more complex and interesting.
Who doesn’t want to do that 
Excel Template Download
This is a small tool to help you with completing this effect as doing the math by hand will take much longer than simply letting this spreadsheet do all the work for you instantly. A few instructions are left within the document itself but basically all one needs to do is collect the reference points from your map and input them into the spreadsheet.
Now, the point references I was speaking of are where the outside intersections of the wall will be on the grid, see the highlighted dots in the image below – Top View of level. Just by using the block tool to create a brush from one point to the other its easy to get the values needed, which here are Y = in Height and X = in width.
*Office 2007
The Method
Just as a precaution set your current texture to Tools\Toolsskip just incase you accidentally leave a reference brush in there it will not effect the finished map compile, these things happen.
- Preparation and Set-Up
- Start off by making a reference brush for the shape of your building – depending on your intent this can also serve as the roof/floor later – and with vertex manipulation move the points around the grid to get the shape you want.In my case I’ve started out with a cylinder with 8 sides and made a completely odd looking layout that has a few 90o angles and two non-standard ones seen in blue and yellow.I’ve done it this way so that there are still a few edges that are either horizontal or vertical because this method works best starting from straight edges and going into an off-grid angled section and back to straight on the grid. Makes life simpler. Once you get the hand of this trick feel free to move into complex things or ask me for a hand.
- Moving on, now that I’ve got my shape I want my building to conform to its time to begin work with the wall template. Pick an edge you want to be used to align with that of the building reference shape you made – I’ll be using the inside edge here seen in blue.
- Now before we start building make sure your wall template is rather long as we are going to make two quick cuts to it so that placement onto the building will be easier. Going in from each end of the wall template make a cut on a really thin angle so that it forms a rather pointy trapezoid with the smaller edge being the one your placing onto the reference shape as seen on the right. Its VERY IMPORTANT that the points your cutting from on the edges are on the grid system.This is so that we can use the inside – or outside if you’ve done so – edges points to accurately place them onto the grid via vertex manipulation when we start moving them around our buildings shape along convex angled side connections.
- Make another copy of your cut wall template and then do the opposite angled cut in the last step, this time the edge thats getting placed onto the reference shape should be the longer side of the trapezoid. We need this form of shape when dealing with the concave angled side connections.Now you’ve got your two templates ready to be used we can move them away from our workspace so that they don’t get lost or accidentally used. Always work from copies of them via holding SHIFT When dragging the object with the mouse, or alternatively the basic Copy/Paste functions.
- Starting Your First Angle
- Starting with the bottom of the building shape move the wall template onto the correct edge depending on how your going to be cutting. I’ve moved mine so the inside edge is along the reference shape. Pick which direction you want to go around your building shape, then collect the necessary info we need from that angle to proceed. Click the Brush/block Tool and make sure toolsskip is still the current texture, create a block that goes from the two points of that angle to get the reference points needed.
- Open up the Excel Calculator sheet and put those numbers in. If your starting edge was a horizontal section within the viewport in hammer then place it with the value for height in first and then width underneath it. If you’ve done it such that the viewport shows that your starting edge was vertical than its width/height instead.It will now show you what angle the line is on along with the angle it will need to cut along to make a perfect dividing line in the intersecting wall templates.
- Use the brush/block tool again and create a 1 x 1 brush – height matters not, but for convince make it taller than the rest of the geometry your working with – with the toolsskip texture still – and then right click on it, select Transform. Click the Scale Option and then input the numbers for X and Y as shown in the Excel document. Don’t worry about where each value goes, as long as you place them into the X and Y scale factors boxes it will create a shape you can then move around and rotate as needed for making cuts.
- Select the newly created ‘Cutting Reference’ and use vertex manipulation to make sure all the points are on the grid. Then move one of the vertices’s and merge it with one next to it to create a triangle shape. There should be a pop-up that asks you if you want to merge or not, select yes. With vertex manip move the entire triangle by selecting all the verticies and place the point of the cutting reference to the point on the building reference shape that the angle starts on. If the line doesn’t look right or appear to divide it perfectly in half, rotate it by 90o and re-place it onto the point.
- With another copy of the wall template rotate it by the first angle value given in the calculator. You may have to rotate it by 90o or even flip it to get it oriented correctly with that of the building reference shape. Now with vertex manipulation move the entire template onto that angled line by moving one of the corner points onto the end of the angles line so that there is a bit of overlap between your two wall templates.The cutting reference brush should show the longer side of the triangle going right down the point of intersection like shown on the right.
- Now the simple part of selecting one of your walls and clicking on the cutting tool and placing the two points for the cutting line on those of the cutting reference brush. Before hitting ENTER to slice the brush, make sure the side you want to keep is highlighted in WHITE and the side you want to remove is highlighted in RED.Repeat that action to the other wall and you’ve now got a perfectly cut edge for intersecting brushes.Congratulations. Practise this on the other sides of your shape if you’ve been following along. Add this tutorial to your bookmarks for future reading if needed or use just the Excel document with the basic info provided within it.
Note, I’ve gone ahead and done all the 90o edges as thats an easy cut that we are all familiar with, so all thats left are the angled sections we need to complete.
Final Words
Some things to remember are that this method works best when going from a face that runs along the grid system to one that doesn’t and the end points of these angled sections remaining on the grid as well otherwise you will not be able to line up your cutting brush.
Also, Always check to make sure you placed the Height and Width values in the correct order when using the excel sheet in relation to the shape on screen, this has been left into the Excel document as well as a reminder. So if your angle doesn’t quite match that of the one you need to cut, take a look at the values you placed for width/height and swap them to get the correct angle.
And as always, use some common sense when the Excel document spits an angle out at you to see if it does indeed look like the dividing or correct measurement of the existing angle from the brushes. Common problem with obtuse angles.
Enjoy, if you ever have a problem with using this method give me a shout, or require the calculation sheet in a different format I may be able to do that, currently its only Office 2007. If someone wants to re-create it in Open Office or similar free spreadsheet software they are more than welcome to and I will host it within this tutorial.
Lastly, thank you for reading this tutorial, one more step in the battle of overlapping brushwork that makes all the difference in the world.
-Logan “Lost” Dougall
