Tag Archives: mapping

Summer Mapping Initiative

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Nacimota

My god, it’s been a while since I posted on my blog. The planets must have aligned or something. I’ve always been a fan of Valve’s games and the Portal series is no exception. When Portal 2 first came out … Continue reading →

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The Carve Tool and You

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Nacimota

There’s something I’ve always wanted to discuss in regards to mapping with Valve Hammer Editor, and that is the use of the carve tool. As far as I’m aware, the carve tool was never intended to be used with anything other than a rectangular brush, because when given a more complicated primitive to work with (such as a cylinder) the results become quite messy.

This has resulted in many veteran mappers adopting a viewpoint that is essentially “NEVER USE THE CARVE TOOL”, which is then passed on to new and aspiring source mappers who read those kinds of comments in tutorials and forum posts. Despite this, the carve tool remains a useful technique for quickly creating rectangular holes in a brush and shouldn’t be discarded from your mapping arsenal. Continue reading →

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Creating Source Maps with SketchUp

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Nacimota

Valve released the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools recently, which included some plugins for Google SketchUp. In this video, I’ll show you the basics of exporting SketchUp geometry into the .VMF format. The plugins export generic VMF data, so it works with other Source games too. If you don’t have Left 4 Dead, you won’t have the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, so I’ve uploaded the SketchUp plugins for anyone who wants them for mapping in other source games:

http://files.nacimota.com/sketchup_plugins.zip Continue reading →

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