# Tutorial #5: Connecting Rooms In this tutorial, we’re going to be using Radiant’s brush clipper, moving some vertexes around, and aligning things for texture placement. In the preceding tutorial’s, we made a square room and an octagonal room. All of your walls, ceilings and floors should be 32 units thick. If you haven’t done so, slap some textures on your brushes. Here’s a list of textures I used: Square Room: Walls: e3u3/metal23_2 Floor: e1u3/cindr4_2 Ceiling: e1u3/met4_5 Square Room: Walls: e1u3/cindr2_1 Floor: e1u3/cindr4_2 Ceiling: e1u3/cinder1_7 ### Step-by-Step Procedure The first thing we need to do is drag out a brush that will do two things: first, it will be the cutting brush to knock a hole in a wall; second, we will re-use and hollow out the cutting brush to make our hallway. See figure 1 to see how I placed the brush through the wall to make my hole. Figure 1 - Brush in position to cut hole in wall (Side view). Now click on the CSG Subtract button to cut the hole. Don’t delete the brush, because we’re going to use it to form the passageway. Move the brush until it looks like the one in figure 2.
Figure 2 - After the hole is cut, the brush is positioned between both rooms.
Since the octagon room is shaped as such, we want to go into vertex mode to change the shape of the brush. Press E on the keyboard and drag the two blue handles until the brush takes on a trapezoid shape. Keep your grid size to 32. Press E again to return to normal edit mode. Now use the Hollow command to turn the trapezoid into a passageway. De-select the brush (Esc) As shown in the picture above, remove the two brushes on the left and right side of the trapezoid-shaped brush so a passageway is opened up. This is best accomplished by navigating your camera into one of the rooms and selecting the first brush by holding the left shift key and clicking on it in the 3D preview window. BACKSPACE deletes the brush. Repeat the process to delete the second brush. Now that you’ve got a passageway between the two rooms, go ahead and texture the brushes faces. Since the floors in both rooms use the same texture, go ahead and apply it to the hall’s floor also. Now we’ve got to deal with those two corners sticking out into the hall. You have a couple of choices. You could move the edge vertices of the walls or you could simply shave them off. Moving the vertices would cause the walls to taper, an undesirable effect. Instead, we will use Radiant’s clipper to shave off those corners. Select one of the walls by shift-clicking on it from the 3D preview window. Zoom in (DELETE) in the main editing window so you get real close. Press X on the keyboard and click on the grid as shown in the picture above. A small '1' will appear. Then click a second time, across from the '1'. The corner should turn yellow, as seen in this shot. Press ENTER to carry out the operation. CTRL-Z will un-do if you’re not happy with the result. Do the same on the other wall. When you're done, press the X key again to toggle the clipper off. If you were off, and clicked on the wrong grid point, hover the mouse pointer over the blue number until it turns into a crosshair. Now click and drag it where you need it.
The clipper operates in a clockwise fashion. If you find the wrong part of the brush turning yellow (indicating it will be chopped) press the X key twice and re-start the clip operation from the opposite direction.
Finally, move the vertices on the two walls so that you end up with 2 16-unit-wide faces, as shown here. The reason for the 16 unit width is that Quake 2 textures are formatted in multiples of 16. This is not to say you can’t have brushes narrower than 16. For alignment purposes however, this is a good practice. See the Texture Tutorial for an in-depth discussion. Once the vertices are moved, select the narrow face (Left Ctrl, Left Shift, Left Click) and apply a 16-unit-wide texture. I used the jaildr2_3 from e1u3. Here is a screen shot of the completed rooms and hallway.
Copyright 1999, by Terry DeLaney. Permission is granted to distribute this file as long as the author receives credit.