The following tutorial covers some patch mesh basics - creating a beveled inner wall complete with round floor edge trim and standard flooring that aligns properly. The final product will look like this :-

You will require the following basic knowledge :-

Creating/manipulating standard brushes and texturing them. Creating bevels, Selecting single brush faces and applying textures to them. Caulking. If you are not familiar with these concepts, check out the tutorials in this forum (the Level Editing section of Doom3World.org)

What we have is a standard hallway with a straight standard 90degree bend in it.
On The inside bend we want to create a rounded corner. That's easy enough even for beginners at patch mesh editing, it's a simple bevel patch mesh.

However, in this case, in addition to the floor, we want a floor trim on the edges adjacent to the wall.
The outside wall is no problem, as in this example, we'll just make it a straight 90degree bend.
Our inside wall is the problem, because we need to bend the floor trim so it fits snugly around our curve.

I'm going to start with our brushwork complete - this tutorial will not cover the basics of brushwork and texturing as that has been covered elsewhere and I want to keep things short and sweet.

So, enough rambling.

I'm starting a new map, setting my grid to 16, adding a player start and building my basic brushwork.

In the screenshot below (Screenshot 1) you'll see my hallway with a bend. I've hidden the cieling of the hallway because it's not neccessary and gets in the way of the 3D view.

Screenshot 1

Take a look at the inside corner - you'll see I've left space for our patch mesh work.
The first thing I'm going to do is to caulk the wall brush faces where our curved wall bevel will go.
As a recap, to select single faces of a brush, use the 3D window, hold down CTRL+SHIFT and left click the face with your mouse cursor. Select the Caulk texture from Common -> Caulk and click on it to apply caulk to the selected faces. (Screenshot 2)

Screenshot 2

Now were going to create our bevel.
With whatever wall texture you have chosen, in the XY Top view Draw out a brush that fits exactly inbetween our two 90degree inner walls (Screenshot 3)

Screenshot 3

Tip 1: If you select a brush in the top view and then deselect it, the height of the brush will be used by radiant for the next brush you create.

Tip 2: You can change the active texture by picking a texture from another brush - in the 3D view find a brush with texture on it you would like to use click on it with the middle mouse button.

Tip 3: Following Tip 2 above, if you do the same thing with a brush already selected - IOW, click with the middle mouse button on a texture on another brush, the selected brush will take on the exact same texture properties as the brush you middle-clicked on. This also works with patch meshes.

Now, from the Patch menu, select Bevel. Your brush will turn into a bevel. Most likely, it won't be in the right direction, so keeping in your XY Top View, use the Z -> N button to rotate it so it's facing the right direction. (Top menu buttons) (Screenshot 4) Also, make sure it's exactly positioned and aligned. (Screenshot 5)

Screenshot 4

Screenshot 5

If you've followed this all correctly, your bevel should be the same height as the adjacent walls. At this point, use Tip 3 above to align the texture on your patch mesh - with the patch selected, middle click on an adjacent wall texture and your patch will be aligned perfectly ! (Screenshots 6 & 7)

Screenshot 6

Screenshot 7

That's the easy bit, your bevel is created.
Now comes the tricky bit. We want to create some curved trim that follows our bevel curve and joins onto the floor trim. I've highlighted our floor trim in the screenshot below so you can see clearly where the trim is (Screenshot 8 )

Screenshot 8

Now you'll want to create a brush with the same width as one of the floor trims. You can do this by duplicating a floor trim and resizing it (stretching), or you can follow Tip 1, select a floor trim brush, deselect and then create a new brush.

I'm going to create a brush along the X axis in our XY Top View as indicated in the screenshot below.
I've made it the same width as our straight floor trim and the same length as the "hole" around our wall bevel (Screenshot 9)

Screenshot 9

Now, from the patch menu on the main menu bar, select 'Simple Patch Mesh' and accept the default 3x3 patch density in the dialogue box that pops up. You may find that the resulting 3x3 patch mesh is not aligned vertically with our floor brushes and floor brush trim (Screenshot 10), if so, simply use a side view (or your Z window) to move it into the correct place (Screenshot 11)

Screenshot 10

Screenshot 11

Back in the XY Top view, we are going to keep our patch selected and go into Vertex editing mode by hitting the V key. You'll see our patch mesh control points appear. Working in the XY Top view, you'll see 9 vertex points which correspond to the patch mesh rows and columns. I've zoomed right in so it's easy to see whats going on (Screenshot 12)

Screenshot 12

I'm going to number them from 1 to 9 so you can follow how I'm going to manipulate them into shape.
At this stage, if you've built the same dimension structure as I have using a 16x16 grid, you'll want to switch to an 8x8 grid. (Screenshot 13)
I keep saying it, because it's so important, but the grid is king with doom3 editing and so is getting a sense of scale and size. If you see a texture is 128pixels then you know a brush or patch you use it on will often be 128units in the editor - sure, this is not always the case, but when your learning, keep your grid default at 16x16 and above and work with standard sizes (32, 64, 128, 192, 256 etc) - you'll save yourself a TON of trouble if you stick to these guidelines. Only use smaller grid units when you need to.

Screenshot 13

The first vertex point we are going to move is the one numbered 9. Move your mouse over it and click and drag it into the place indicated in the screenshot below. (Screenshot 14)

Screenshot 14

Now we are going to move vertex point number 8 into the position shown below (Screenshot 15)

Screenshot 15

Next we move vertex point number 7 into the position shown below (Screenshot 16)

Screenshot 16

At this point, you'll notice I'm positioning them on the grid with the same spacing as points 1,2 & 3 - that's exactly how we want them. You MUST stick to the grid !

Now we're going to move points 4, 5 & 6.
I'm only using one screenshot for this because it's very easy. Simply move each point down into the position indicated in the screenshot, starting with either side (point 4 or 6) and working across. (Screenshot 17)

Screenshot 17

Tip 4: If you drag vertex points incorrectly or something goes wrong, simply undo (CTRL+Z) and try again. Sometimes you may need to exit out of vertex editing mode and go back in again (V toggles vertex mode)

That's it, we have some floor curved trim. To get the texture right, follow Tip 3 above if you want, selecting the patch and middle clicking an adjacent floor trim brush texture to set the patch to the same texture. (Screenshot 18 )

Screenshot 18

Right, we're part almost there - but we have a problem - there's still a gap in our floor which we need to fill in. So how do we go about doing that ?

Well, the easiest and quickest way is to create a temporary bevel and cap it - so lets start.

As we did at the beginning of this tutorial, we're going to draw out a brush for our bevel, but because it's a temporary bevel, we don't care what height it is or what texture it's going to use - all we need to do is work in the XY Top View and draw out a square brush that covers the entire area of the curved floor trim we just created (Screenshot 19) I've set my grid back to 16x16 to make things easier.

Screenshot 19

From the patch menu, select Bevel and once again, use the Z -> N rotate button to get it facing the right direction and move it into place so it fits perfectly around the outer edge of our curved floor trim. (Screenshots 20 & 21)

Screenshot 20

Screenshot 21

That's our temporary bevel created, now comes the magic. What we want to do is to Cap that bevel to fill in part of it. With the bevel selected, go to the patch menu and choose Inverted Bevel (Screenshot 22)

Screenshot 22

A dialogue box will pop up - I've no idea why, because I've stated Inverted bevel already, but there we go. Also, for some reason, my Doom3 Cap dialogue box doesn't show up properly in the screenshot - there should be little blue diagrams to the left of each option indicating what they do. No worries, just select Inverted Bevel and click ok. (Screenshot 23)

Screenshot 23

If you did everything right, your hole should now be filled in (Screenshots 24)

Screenshot 24

What we have done is created two caps - one for the top of our bevel and one for the bottom.
We only want one cap and we don't want the temporary bevel anymore.

To delete the stuff we don't want we need to first ungroup our caps and bevel. By default, when you create a cap it groups with the patch mesh you created it from. To ungroup it, select your cap and bevel and from the top menu, Selection -> Ungroup. Alternatively, use the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+G.

When you've done that, deselect everything (ESC key) and select just the temporary bevel we created and delete it and also delete any one of the two caps - use the 3D window for this.

You should now be left with one Cap which should fit perfectly into our hole.

If your confused at this point, your best bet is to select all the brush work surround where you are creating your patches and hide it using the H key - you can then inspect the area in the 3D view to make sure your left with just one cap mesh.

You will probably need to shift it in a side view or your Z window to align it perfectly with our floor level. If your single cap is still showing up as white lines even when not selected, select it and hit CTRL+I to invert the texture. Make sure you only have the one cap and your bevel and spare cap have been deleted. (Screenshot 25)

Screenshot 25

At this point, we could simply leave the cap in the same texture as our floor trim, but I'm going to to make it the same as our floor.

In the 3D view, Select the cap and middle click on a floor brush texture to make the cap the same texture. (Screenshots 26 & 27)

Screenshot 26

Screenshot 27

With DOOMEdit (or radiant) the middle click button is a nifty trick to automagically align your caps or meshes with surrounding brushwork. Alternatively, select your cap, and bring up the Patch Properties dialogue box and click on the CAP button - it does the same thing. Our cap is complete and perfectly aligned (Screenshot 28 )

Screenshot 28

That's it - there's only one final thing to do and that is to put a caulk brush underneath all your patch work. That brush will fit in the hole we had right at the beggining with the exact same height and position as our floor brushes. (Screenshot 29)

Screenshot 29

Back to our very first image in this tutorial - add a light and render to test (Screenshot 30)

Screenshot 30

You can download the map I used for making this tutorial here

That's all for now folks, except for a final word.

If you wanted to make a trim texture on the outer wall, you would follow a similar method to the above. When you get around to filling in the hole left over using the temporary bevel method, you would create a standard cap and not and inverted one.

Give it a try - based on the info in this tutorial, my curved hallway tutorial and other tutorials on this forum and the web, you should be able to manage it !

Great tutorial matt!

Thanks - of course, you know it was created for the other thread to help solve problems

Yeah nice, Id previously made floor trims by just sitting a patch border on top of it around the room, not sure which way is better.

Nice, very nice! Some of the most thorough tutorials I've read.

The last 2 that you've written have demystified some aspects of level creation for me. Thank you. And please keep them coming. I would definitely like to see how Id did their railings.

Sweet, on my map this is EXACTLY what i was about to do. Just in time. Thanks!

Thanks guys - I'll be making a few more on patch mesh creation, as it's a far larger part of the Doom3 universe than I expected. I honed my mesh skills editing for quake3, so I hope to pass that info on.

I really thought Doom3 would be more mapobjects than curves, but it's about 50/50, which is great.

I'll be making tutorials about practical meshwork, as the last 2 were, based on things you see all the time in Doom3.

Hooray!

Sweet tutorial.. now I have my edging rounded like it's supposed to be

Thank you very much...

-Jason

Images aren't appearing and was wondering if anyone could provide them or links. Thanks!

See the original topic, with all images:

http://web.archive.org/web/200410120644 ... php?t=4572

The following tutorial covers some patch mesh basics - creating a beveled inner wall complete with round floor edge trim and standard flooring that aligns properly. The final product will look like this :-

You will require the following basic knowledge :-

Creating/manipulating standard brushes and texturing them. Creating bevels, Selecting single brush faces and applying textures to them. Caulking. If you are not familiar with these concepts, check out the tutorials in this forum (the Level Editing section of Doom3World.org)

What we have is a standard hallway with a straight standard 90degree bend in it.
On The inside bend we want to create a rounded corner. That's easy enough even for beginners at patch mesh editing, it's a simple bevel patch mesh.

However, in this case, in addition to the floor, we want a floor trim on the edges adjacent to the wall.
The outside wall is no problem, as in this example, we'll just make it a straight 90degree bend.
Our inside wall is the problem, because we need to bend the floor trim so it fits snugly around our curve.

I'm going to start with our brushwork complete - this tutorial will not cover the basics of brushwork and texturing as that has been covered elsewhere and I want to keep things short and sweet.

So, enough rambling.

I'm starting a new map, setting my grid to 16, adding a player start and building my basic brushwork.

In the screenshot below (Screenshot 1) you'll see my hallway with a bend. I've hidden the cieling of the hallway because it's not neccessary and gets in the way of the 3D view.

Screenshot 1

Take a look at the inside corner - you'll see I've left space for our patch mesh work.
The first thing I'm going to do is to caulk the wall brush faces where our curved wall bevel will go.
As a recap, to select single faces of a brush, use the 3D window, hold down CTRL+SHIFT and left click the face with your mouse cursor. Select the Caulk texture from Common -> Caulk and click on it to apply caulk to the selected faces. (Screenshot 2)

Screenshot 2

Now were going to create our bevel.
With whatever wall texture you have chosen, in the XY Top view Draw out a brush that fits exactly inbetween our two 90degree inner walls (Screenshot 3)

Screenshot 3

Tip 1: If you select a brush in the top view and then deselect it, the height of the brush will be used by radiant for the next brush you create.

Tip 2: You can change the active texture by picking a texture from another brush - in the 3D view find a brush with texture on it you would like to use click on it with the middle mouse button.

Tip 3: Following Tip 2 above, if you do the same thing with a brush already selected - IOW, click with the middle mouse button on a texture on another brush, the selected brush will take on the exact same texture properties as the brush you middle-clicked on. This also works with patch meshes.

Now, from the Patch menu, select Bevel. Your brush will turn into a bevel. Most likely, it won't be in the right direction, so keeping in your XY Top View, use the Z -> N button to rotate it so it's facing the right direction. (Top menu buttons) (Screenshot 4) Also, make sure it's exactly positioned and aligned. (Screenshot 5)

Screenshot 4

Screenshot 5

If you've followed this all correctly, your bevel should be the same height as the adjacent walls. At this point, use Tip 3 above to align the texture on your patch mesh - with the patch selected, middle click on an adjacent wall texture and your patch will be aligned perfectly ! (Screenshots 6 & 7)

Screenshot 6

Screenshot 7

That's the easy bit, your bevel is created.
Now comes the tricky bit. We want to create some curved trim that follows our bevel curve and joins onto the floor trim. I've highlighted our floor trim in the screenshot below so you can see clearly where the trim is (Screenshot 8 )

Screenshot 8

Now you'll want to create a brush with the same width as one of the floor trims. You can do this by duplicating a floor trim and resizing it (stretching), or you can follow Tip 1, select a floor trim brush, deselect and then create a new brush.

I'm going to create a brush along the X axis in our XY Top View as indicated in the screenshot below.
I've made it the same width as our straight floor trim and the same length as the "hole" around our wall bevel (Screenshot 9)

Screenshot 9

Now, from the patch menu on the main menu bar, select 'Simple Patch Mesh' and accept the default 3x3 patch density in the dialogue box that pops up. You may find that the resulting 3x3 patch mesh is not aligned vertically with our floor brushes and floor brush trim (Screenshot 10), if so, simply use a side view (or your Z window) to move it into the correct place (Screenshot 11)

Screenshot 10

Screenshot 11

Back in the XY Top view, we are going to keep our patch selected and go into Vertex editing mode by hitting the V key. You'll see our patch mesh control points appear. Working in the XY Top view, you'll see 9 vertex points which correspond to the patch mesh rows and columns. I've zoomed right in so it's easy to see whats going on (Screenshot 12)

Screenshot 12

I'm going to number them from 1 to 9 so you can follow how I'm going to manipulate them into shape.
At this stage, if you've built the same dimension structure as I have using a 16x16 grid, you'll want to switch to an 8x8 grid. (Screenshot 13)
I keep saying it, because it's so important, but the grid is king with doom3 editing and so is getting a sense of scale and size. If you see a texture is 128pixels then you know a brush or patch you use it on will often be 128units in the editor - sure, this is not always the case, but when your learning, keep your grid default at 16x16 and above and work with standard sizes (32, 64, 128, 192, 256 etc) - you'll save yourself a TON of trouble if you stick to these guidelines. Only use smaller grid units when you need to.

Screenshot 13

The first vertex point we are going to move is the one numbered 9. Move your mouse over it and click and drag it into the place indicated in the screenshot below. (Screenshot 14)

Screenshot 14

Now we are going to move vertex point number 8 into the position shown below (Screenshot 15)

Screenshot 15

Next we move vertex point number 7 into the position shown below (Screenshot 16)

Screenshot 16

At this point, you'll notice I'm positioning them on the grid with the same spacing as points 1,2 & 3 - that's exactly how we want them. You MUST stick to the grid !

Now we're going to move points 4, 5 & 6.
I'm only using one screenshot for this because it's very easy. Simply move each point down into the position indicated in the screenshot, starting with either side (point 4 or 6) and working across. (Screenshot 17)

Screenshot 17

Tip 4: If you drag vertex points incorrectly or something goes wrong, simply undo (CTRL+Z) and try again. Sometimes you may need to exit out of vertex editing mode and go back in again (V toggles vertex mode)

That's it, we have some floor curved trim. To get the texture right, follow Tip 3 above if you want, selecting the patch and middle clicking an adjacent floor trim brush texture to set the patch to the same texture. (Screenshot 18 )

Screenshot 18

Right, we're part almost there - but we have a problem - there's still a gap in our floor which we need to fill in. So how do we go about doing that ?

Well, the easiest and quickest way is to create a temporary bevel and cap it - so lets start.

As we did at the beginning of this tutorial, we're going to draw out a brush for our bevel, but because it's a temporary bevel, we don't care what height it is or what texture it's going to use - all we need to do is work in the XY Top View and draw out a square brush that covers the entire area of the curved floor trim we just created (Screenshot 19) I've set my grid back to 16x16 to make things easier.

Screenshot 19

From the patch menu, select Bevel and once again, use the Z -> N rotate button to get it facing the right direction and move it into place so it fits perfectly around the outer edge of our curved floor trim. (Screenshots 20 & 21)

Screenshot 20

Screenshot 21

That's our temporary bevel created, now comes the magic. What we want to do is to Cap that bevel to fill in part of it. With the bevel selected, go to the patch menu and choose Inverted Bevel (Screenshot 22)

Screenshot 22

A dialogue box will pop up - I've no idea why, because I've stated Inverted bevel already, but there we go. Also, for some reason, my Doom3 Cap dialogue box doesn't show up properly in the screenshot - there should be little blue diagrams to the left of each option indicating what they do. No worries, just select Inverted Bevel and click ok. (Screenshot 23)

Screenshot 23

If you did everything right, your hole should now be filled in (Screenshots 24)

Screenshot 24

What we have done is created two caps - one for the top of our bevel and one for the bottom.
We only want one cap and we don't want the temporary bevel anymore.

To delete the stuff we don't want we need to first ungroup our caps and bevel. By default, when you create a cap it groups with the patch mesh you created it from. To ungroup it, select your cap and bevel and from the top menu, Selection -> Ungroup. Alternatively, use the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+G.

When you've done that, deselect everything (ESC key) and select just the temporary bevel we created and delete it and also delete any one of the two caps - use the 3D window for this.

You should now be left with one Cap which should fit perfectly into our hole.

If your confused at this point, your best bet is to select all the brush work surround where you are creating your patches and hide it using the H key - you can then inspect the area in the 3D view to make sure your left with just one cap mesh.

You will probably need to shift it in a side view or your Z window to align it perfectly with our floor level. If your single cap is still showing up as white lines even when not selected, select it and hit CTRL+I to invert the texture. Make sure you only have the one cap and your bevel and spare cap have been deleted. (Screenshot 25)

Screenshot 25

At this point, we could simply leave the cap in the same texture as our floor trim, but I'm going to to make it the same as our floor.

In the 3D view, Select the cap and middle click on a floor brush texture to make the cap the same texture. (Screenshots 26 & 27)

Screenshot 26

Screenshot 27

With DOOMEdit (or radiant) the middle click button is a nifty trick to automagically align your caps or meshes with surrounding brushwork. Alternatively, select your cap, and bring up the Patch Properties dialogue box and click on the CAP button - it does the same thing. Our cap is complete and perfectly aligned (Screenshot 28 )

Screenshot 28

That's it - there's only one final thing to do and that is to put a caulk brush underneath all your patch work. That brush will fit in the hole we had right at the beggining with the exact same height and position as our floor brushes. (Screenshot 29)

Screenshot 29

Back to our very first image in this tutorial - add a light and render to test (Screenshot 30)

Screenshot 30

You can download the map I used for making this tutorial here

That's all for now folks, except for a final word.

If you wanted to make a trim texture on the outer wall, you would follow a similar method to the above. When you get around to filling in the hole left over using the temporary bevel method, you would create a standard cap and not and inverted one.

Give it a try - based on the info in this tutorial, my curved hallway tutorial and other tutorials on this forum and the web, you should be able to manage it !

Great tutorial matt!

Thanks - of course, you know it was created for the other thread to help solve problems

Yeah nice, Id previously made floor trims by just sitting a patch border on top of it around the room, not sure which way is better.

Nice, very nice! Some of the most thorough tutorials I've read.

The last 2 that you've written have demystified some aspects of level creation for me. Thank you. And please keep them coming. I would definitely like to see how Id did their railings.

Sweet, on my map this is EXACTLY what i was about to do. Just in time. Thanks!

Thanks guys - I'll be making a few more on patch mesh creation, as it's a far larger part of the Doom3 universe than I expected. I honed my mesh skills editing for quake3, so I hope to pass that info on.

I really thought Doom3 would be more mapobjects than curves, but it's about 50/50, which is great.

I'll be making tutorials about practical meshwork, as the last 2 were, based on things you see all the time in Doom3.

Hooray!

Sweet tutorial.. now I have my edging rounded like it's supposed to be

Thank you very much...

-Jason

Images aren't appearing and was wondering if anyone could provide them or links. Thanks!

See the original topic, with all images:

http://web.archive.org/web/200410120644 ... php?t=4572

Dogstar wrote:

See the original topic, with all images:

http://web.archive.org/web/200410120644 ... php?t=4572

Thank you soo much