Advanced geometry:part 3

In this tutorial I will shown you how to use primitives, prefabs and trims.

Primitives

Primitives are used to make the most basic brushes. This tool is located here:

Select cylinder from the objects tab. Now make a cube brush

When you hit enter, a vertical cylinder will be made. select the cylinder and press ctrl+m. The transformation tool will open up and it will look like this:

As you can see, with this tool you can resize and rotate your brush in any angle.

Click the z axis and enter the angle to rotate to. In this way you can manipulate your brush to any coordinate.

Don't forget to select the block option from the object tab after making the cylinder.

Prefabs

Prefabs just mean pre fabricated materials. Lets say you have made a crate and textured it. Now you don't want to make the crate again and again. For this, make the crate into a prefab. Make the crate and select it. Now select the prefab button located below the primitives tool.

A dialog box will come up asking you to select the section in which you want to place your prefab. Select any one and click enter. Now you have successfully made a prefab. To place your prefab,select the category below the primitives option. You can also add prefabs which are already given.

Trim textures

This part shows you how to add more detail to your map using brushes and textures.

First, we make an example map. I have made one for this purpose as you can see:

Now we will make a good looking room from this barren area.

For this map, I will go with a lab enviroment. I selecte a few specific textures for the wall. After some time, my map looked like this:

Now comes the trim. To make the detail stand out, I am going to cut the top part and the bottom part of the pillar and put a trim texture on it. The trim texture is just an ordinary texture. You can actually use any texture but a trim texture will do the best. Simply type trim in the texture selection window and select a good trim texture. You may need to resize the texture a bit though.

     Now, make a wall and join it to the pillar. Add trim to the wall and make a cylinder.Texture the cylinder using the pipe, generic or silo names in the texture browser and the cylinder horizontally along the wall and make a carving on the floor. Add 2 pipes in the carving. Texture the top of the carving with a grate texture and tie it to a func_wall entity and change its render mode to solid and change its fx amount to 255.

Done right, it will look like this:

Pretty right?

Notice the trims. I have used a light_spot entity for the directional light and a simple light entity underneath it for ambient night. 

This is the actual in-game screenshot:

I have added a red light entity in the carving for the pipes to be more noticeable.