Things that are important in Source mapping

These are but a few things I’ve learned through the mistakes I’ve made in a few weeks of mapping in Hammer with custom props.

1. Grid size of interior spaces

I don’t just mean building on a grid so that all your brushes fit into a grid of 8/16/32/64 units.  Equally important is making the exact size of the interior space of your rooms a multiple of a standard prop length.  If you intend to use static props to decorate a room as shown above, the size of the room needs to be very particular.  In the example shown above, the wall section in which I want to fit this row of props is 1344 inches long.  That fits the grid fine as it’s 64*21, but the prop I’m trying to use is 256 inches, which doesn’t divide evenly into 1344.  The props could be extended past the wall, but that’s a sloppy solution that doesn’t always work.

2. Relative scale of objects within a scene

This is pretty fundamental.  You can see a very noticeable difference in texture scale (and polygon density) between the arch and the corner column.  In my mind as I was working on the column and roof elements, the room seemed a lot smaller than it actually is.  Once I got everything together ingame, the jump in quality was very jarring.  This definitely needs to be changed, probably by separating the whole column shape into smaller pieces, and using BSP for the body of the column with static prop decorations on the bottom.

Here you can see another example.  The onion dome is a lot large than I was imagining it, and I think it ended up looking so comically large as to be structurally unbelievable.  The windows at the base are large enough for the player to fit through.  Additionally, the sparsely detailed areas seem even more bland when enlarged, which brings me to another point.

3. Reference material and concept art

Also very fundamental.  The design for the arches was more-or-less lifted from arches in the Mezquita de Cordoba in Spain.  I don’t have any qualms about this thievery, because I’m no concept artist.  That’s exactly why I should lean much more heavily on reference than I did for the corner supports, roof, and dome, which were more or less pulled from nowhere.  I think the difference in quality, especially in the half-assed textures, really shows.

In addition to making custom props detailed and fundamentally appealing to the eye, it’s good to have a general sketch of the level from an aesthetic point of view.  I can come up with passable props if I am inspired by (i.e. steal from) enough reference material, but more complicated tasks like putting it all together with a coherent color scheme are more difficult.  I’d like to blame that on my school’s foundation design courses for their lack of practical, commercially-oriented instruction.  But boo-hooing aside, I need to do more to hammer those things out ahead of time and make sure they look good before moving on.

4. Modularity

Aside from this roof’s aesthetic issues, the biggest problem is that it’s made of two giant chunks.  It would have been four, but lamentably, the Source engine is apparently unable to mirror static props and can only rotate them.  I realized after putting this roof together that it doesn’t do much that BSP couldn’t do, it doesn’t use texture space efficiently, and most criminally, there’s absolutely no context other than this particular building in which it can be used.  It needs to be broken up into smaller chunks, and it would probably be better to use BSP for the top of the plateau so that it can take advantage of lightmapping.