OK, having a stage almost completely built, and learning my way around GTK, I've thought of a couple of questions that would save me more time in mapping with GTK.

#1- Is it better to make one giant brush for a shared wall (first and second floor, room to room, or celing/floor), or is it better to make two or more seperate brushes? I gater it would take up more memory if you used more, however I don't know if it really matters?

#2- Mitering! where should I do this? Should I concern myself with this?

Thanks.

Is it better to make one giant brush -- yes but doesnt really matter much, the compiler tries to connsolidate adjacent coplaner faces. but a single brushface will be split anyway every 512 units.

Mitering! where should I do this? Should I concern myself with this? -- yes you miter where 2 brush meet on outside edges (it saves a few polygons) mitering the inside edges does nothing at all. example:

miter when inside does nothing
Lx

miter when outside saves a few poly
xL

so this is not a big thing, what is more important is to plan your visibility before laying each brush or the map will lag.

@brutus: i think you are referring to q3map2's -meta switch. I'm not 100% sure what it does, but i do know that it will never ever merge two faces from separate brushes.

@Drach: I've been wondering that same thing:
multiple brushes is in most cases best.
1) yes, you create extra tris
2) it's better for vis (the separate brushes don't have to be drawn all the time)
3) You will get a little bit less trouble with light leaks. If the big brush span many rooms, and lighting is different in each of these rooms -> visible light leaks. This can still occur with separate brushes (as lightmaps can be shared over brushes), but will happen less.


but my current almost-done-just-needs-some-tweaking map does have big brushes spanning multiple floors

fraco

@brutus?

lol.. mistaken identity I think.

oops

Hwy, thanks a lot!

I noticed the light leaks, and am seeing that it's not bad to share a wall or floor. Just gotta watch the lights is all.

By Mitering the outside wall, you guys mean, the walls that the player will see only from the inside, but not on the outside, right?
I had a little problem with mitering because I didn't know exactly where I should do it is all. So I stopped doing it completely until I got word form you dudes.

Thanks!

I think this was what narc was trying to tell you.

If you can only view the walls from the inside, then only 2 brush faces will be drawn.


If the same walls can be seen from the outside, they will be drawn like this.


In that case, the walls need to be mitered so only 2 brush sides are drawn.


Hope this helps.

One other thing. Whatever you do, NEVER have 2 brushes overlap each other.
This Is a very bad thing to do.

WOW, Baltic, that helps A LOT.
I started caulking my map today, and it makes the BSP process take longer.. but the framerate in the map is much better.

The mitering I did backwards. I did the walls that the player cannot see, so it's drawing a bunch of brush faces instead of just 2.


Now the map will be faster than I could have possibally imagined!

Thanks, you guys rule
m/