Skip Navigation
Resources
Group Information

Making arches with trim

Arches

This tutorial should show you a (not the!) way to make good looking arches.

1. First of all make some little room to place our arch in, with a wall in the middle which should be 64 units thick (for this tutorial). Leave out some space for the arch, in my example it is 256 units in width and 184 in height. It should look something like this:




Here I have already inserted an info_player_start. You can place it now or at the end of the tutorial.

2. Our next task is to make a bevel. It should have 128 units from top and 128 from the side:








3. With the bevel still selected press "shift + c" or navigate in the menu to curve, cap-selection. Here choose "Inverted Bevel" and uncheck the option "Result to func_group". If you never used groups you maby are wondering what this was good for. If we don't uncheck this box the bevel and the caps will be handled like one piece when selected, but we need to select only one part of what we get now. Press OK to go on.





4. Now we select one face of the bevel and press "ctrl + i". this inverts the face so that we see the back side of it. Keep it selected and choose from the menu Curve -> thicken or simply press "ctrl + t". A window will pop up and ask for the amount to thicken. Change the value which should be 8 to 16 and press ok. That's about it, now select everything you made at the one side of the arch, press space to copy it and flip it so that you can put it on the other side:






You will see that there are 2 parts missing at the bottom, simply make two brushes, 64 units long, 16 thick and 56 high to fill the spaces. That was all work to make the arch itself now do the texturing.

5. Select the caps of the arch and choose the same texture as you used on the wall in my case it's "castle_grid_c19m". Press "shift + s" to use the surface inspector for curves. Choose CAP and press done.If all textures line up correctly you get this:





Now select both bevels which still are caulked, right click to bring up the context menu and choose "Ungroup Entity". As this bevel was still a func_group (we had that before) we had to manually ungroup it so that we get the single faces again. How you texture the bevel i leave up to you as there are several texturing tutorials on other sites. If you still don't know what this all was good for have a look at this gate from mp_castle which i presume is made in the same way:





IMHO this looks much better than if it would be a normal bevel with all the same textures on it not at last because you can never align them perfectly to the caps. If you have some easier way to do this or if you spot any mistake plz post it at the forum.



Problems, Comments, Queries > Forum

Tutorial by Muffinman

Surface mini-logo Surface mini-logo