Get Rid of those Sparkles

This is a Tutorial on how to get rid of those darn sparkles..

This is a give away of a new maper if your mesh's have them.
They are easy to get rid of if you understand what causes them.
If you are running Quake3 Arena in 32 bit color and 32bit textures with high detail sky on, you might not see them all.
So to test your map, too make sure you didn't miss any, run it in 16 bit color,16 bit texture and low res sky.

This is what a sparkle looks like, They are caused by a t-junction error more on that later.


This corner is made out of a  one big bevel and the walls are made out of two brush's one for the trim and other for the block. 

This is why there is sparkles. The wall brush is split into triangle that don't match the bevels.
Too fix this there are a few options: one add a trim brush on both sides of the bevel like this.


Or two add another bevel and stack them at the same plane as the brush.


This is what it looks like without sparkles.



So you want to know what a t-junction error is, think of it as when the .bsp processes the map it splits the brush into triangles but it can't do this at any point on a mesh (in this case a bevel) it can only do it from a mesh control points.
So the big key to avoiding sparkles is to have only one brush on a side of a mesh. Don't forget to caulk behind all mesh's.
To avoid Z-fighting (were two textures are trying to be drawn on the same plane at the same time.
You can also get sparkles between two brush's, it only happens when a vertex point is not snapped to the grid and aligned with the vertex point of the brush next to it.
This can happen easily  when clipping brush's for lets say a rock wall.

One other tip fog, water, slime brush's can also cause sparkles so always split you brush's and stack any mesh's along the top plane of said fog, water, slime brush.....

The following short cut keys will come in handy while working with meshes:

ctrl-G               Snap to grid (I use this one a lot)
ctrl- I                Invert texture
shift-control-N   Cycles cap textures patch
V key              Turns on vertices so you can drag them.
control-N          Naturalize patch texture
Control-P         Toggle show patches 
shift-C             Cap selected curve
shift-S             Patch Inspector (I use this one a lot)
Ctrl-D             Toggle detail brush's on and off.

Now lets go make some maps with out these little errors ok.