 |
Qworkshop3 Tutorials
| Moving
Spine Tutorial by
Crashmeplease |
|
So you want to
put one of those egg moving tubes seen in
almost every popular sci-fi film into your
map eh? And before you say, 'it can't be
done boss', haven't you noticed them in
Q3DM4? What, you've been busy fraggin and
not noticed them ! Go take a look now. Just
for the lamers who have no idea what I'm on
about, here's a quick snippet.
Hmm, now
you're thinking that looks complicated, how
on earth did they manage that ? Well, it's
sooo easy, you wouldn't believe it. Just one
word and it all makes sense, shader. No come
back, it's only a word.
The way it
works is quite simple, the shader is called gothic_block>gkcspinemove,
uses the texture gothic_block>gkc17d,
and has a surface property enabled that
allows it to move in a funky sorta way,
that's all I'm going to say, if you wanna
learn about shaders then RTFM.
Basically,
what we need is a mesh cylinder. First lets
make a brush for the cylinder, a good size
is 64x64x512 For the sake of this tut, use
this sized brush, cos for one, I know this
size works well, and two, changing the mesh
density drastically alters the allowed
movement of shader. The higher the density,
the more movement. I'm a kind person, and
have an example of what I mean in a BSP file
coming up later.
One
final point I'd like to make out, if your
cylinders etc. start disappearing when you
deselect them, you will need to select the View
> Show > Show Curves menu
option or by pressing <CTRL><P>
Now enough
blabbering, lets make a start. In the top
window view drag a brush square brush 64
units wide, and then from the side/front
views drag the box down to make it 512 units
in length. Make it a very dense cylinder, Curve
> More Cylinders > Very Dense Cylinder.
We also need to straighten it out a bit, Curve
> Matrix > Re-disperse > Rows.
It'll look something like this.
| Lets
apply the shader, it's called gkcspinemove.
First
Click on the mesh cylinder to select
it if it's not already selected. Go
to Textures
> gothic_block, and if you
don't have your texture window up
press <T>
when they're loaded in. Go down to
the shader gkcspinemove
and select this, and be careful
here, you may also see the texture gkc17d,
which is just the texture on its
own, I don't want any lamers saying
that it doesn't work, just cos they
have used the texture and not the
shader. Just a note, you know when
it's a shader cos it will have a
white box around it in the texture
window. |
 |
Now we will
need to sort out the position of our
texture. With the mesh cylinder still
selected, hit <Ctrl><N>
to naturalize the texture, and then <Shift><PgUp>
to rotate, press
a couple of times til it's pointing the
right way, or if you prefer, bring up the
Patch Inspector <Shift><P>
and edit it there, hopefully it now looks
like this.
That's all
there was to it. But just for lamers sake,
lets shape it up a bit so we can hang it
from our ceiling, just like Q3DM4.
We'll use the patch bend tool for this, with
the mesh cylinder selected, select the patch
bend tool There is a little info box that
pops up to guide you through the process,
cos it's a little bewildering at first.
<Tab>
through the bend points, till the one after
the middle is selected, c pic 1,
then press
<Enter>.
Again <Tab>
through the rotation axis until it looks
like pic 2,
then <Enter>
again
. Now we choose which side to bend, pic 3,
and then make it look like pic 4.
Hopefully,
you can use the patch bend tool to create
this sorta shape now, which makes it look
like it's hanging down more naturally. It's
important not to bend our egg tube too much,
for one it looks less natural, and most
importantly, you don't get the visual feel
of the movement, it appears more irregular.
Doh, why not bend it more yourself and c
what I mean.
That's about
it, all you need to do is put it into your
map and gaze at its glory.
Here
is a ready made .BSP to give you an idea
what to expect. There is also an example
of a regular density cylinder and a dense
cylinder, so you can compare their movement,
and If you wander near then, you get a nice
little msg tellin u which is which :o)
And for those of u too lazy to try the map yourselves,
here is a little piccy.
If
your looking for a .MAP you won't find one,
the whole point of this tut is for U to try
yourselves, and not just cut n paste.
This
tut was written by Crashmeplease,
feel free to send any comments my way
|
|
|
|
|
