How do I remove the lines on the ground between sections?

[Captain Jack]

http://img334.imageshack.us/img334/9140/lines5yg.jpg
http://img320.imageshack.us/img320/6619/lines21qv.jpg

These images are some of the lines that are part of the ground of the map. Since the ground brush was so large, I cut it into smaller pieces with the clip tool. Now the separations are clearly visible, although some lines are more visible than others. I haven't changed the elevation of any part of it except for where the water is.

I really hope there's a solution to this because it pretty much ruins the map.

 

[Raeven0]

If you have a lot of displacements touching each other, then there will be a VBSP warning about going over the limit (it's 160 or so), and the lighting across displacements will be iffy. There's nothing you can do about this except reduce the number of displacements that must be lit together. If you're not too far over the limit, you can just reduce the power on some of them.

 

[Captain Jack]

I reduced all my displacements to 2, and it still does this. Do you have any other ideas?

 

[Limpet]

Why not just turn the other brushes into displacements?
For some reason the textures that blend together do that when you turn them into displacements. I had the same thing happen to me.

 

[Captain Jack]

I'm not sure what you mean by that. All the grass sections are displacements. I'm trying to learn how to use Hammer, so I'm probably misunderstanding you.

Is there any way to combine the different sections into one large one?

 

[Albino]

|I think what you need is the paint alha tool

its night next too the paint geometry tool. Once selected, search for a texture with "alpha" in the title, or "blend", cant remember which one, then blend to your hearts content

 

[Limpet]

I didn't have to paint any alpha, just selected the surface and created a displacement and it matched the other peices

 

[Captain Jack]

The pain alpha won't fix the problem because it's lighting problem, not texture. What I'm going to do is just delete the entire ground and see if I can get it fight. It's not possible to use a displacement power higher than 4, is it?

 

[Captain Jack]

Also, you can only have one texture per brush, right?

 

[Ti133700N]

Also, you can only have one texture per brush, right?

Nope, you can have more than one texture per brush but only one texture per face.

 

[Captain Jack]

Well yeah, that's what I meant.

 

[Ennui]

right, why would you want 2 textures on one face anyway.... wouldnt really work

 

[Raeven0]

Paint Alpha allows you to have two textures per face. Then you have the animated textures, with which you could theoretically have as many as 1 000 textures per face (though only one could be shown at once). With overlays you can safely have up to five textures per face.

 

[Pesmerga]

Why are you cutting up the ground brushes?

 

[Lamer]

mini question- which texture has this little grass bits sticking out vertically from the ground??
or is this a prop?

 

[Captain Jack]

Why are you cutting up the ground brushes?

The main reason was because I wanted to give the water a natural curved look, and with only one brush it would come out square.

mini question- which texture has this little grass bits sticking out vertically from the ground??
or is this a prop?

I'm not really sure how it works, but it appeared by itself when I used the grass/dirt blend texture.

 

[Polykarbon]

Displacement textures align to the sub-surface level of the grid. So if you have 2 brush faces that you turn into 2 equal parallel displacements, you will have to realign the textures. They will be aligned on different cordon levels in the X/Y alignment. You can change that in the texture application menu. The easiest way is to choose a mesh, select it; and then right click the face of the second mesh. This will align the cordon mesh textures together.

Align to world should only be used with brushes, and shouldn't be used at all with any arbitrary angles facing each other[For logical texture alignment sakes].

You shouldn't have much static light problems with displacements. Dynamic Vex lighting is still buggy with the way Valve implemented GLVEX meshes for displacements. They could fix it...but we'll see if they do. It's all contained in the direct API. If it wasn't in the main API aperture I would have already fixed it for the mod I'm working on.

For rendering ability I always use displacement meshes in unit stacks. IE Don't go using a 2^2048[unit] displacement unless you decrease the light grid to 10 or so. If you have a 2^2048[unit] displacement aligned 1/1 with a similar 4^1024[unit] mesh, you can expect some Binary tree warnings. To remedy all you need to do is develop your displacements so they align power to unit ahead of time.

--The Conqueror Worm Lead Programmer
--Polykarbon