Staircase - A simple solution?

[Calhoun]

I'm trying to make the ceiling gradually ascend with the brushes of the ceiling "connected," so that they don't have a height gap and appear like a set of stairs. I don't know if it's possible or how to do it and Vertex Manipulation and Transformation have only given me unwanted results or errors thus far, and can't think of a simple method for achieving what I'm trying to do.

A picture of the section I'm working on for reference.

Help me Halplief2.net, you're my only hope.

 

[Vegeta897]

That's easy work with Vertex Manipulation. You're doing something wrong!

 

[Pesmerga]

Connect the circles with the squares. Simple vertix manipulation. Be sure you're choosing BOTH circled vertices and connecting them with their adjacent squared vertices.

 

[Calhoun]

So then what is shown in this picture is fine, and it is alright if they are invalid solids?

 

[Vegeta897]

Oh right, forgot about that.

You need to split the brushes into triangles.

Like in this top view image, split along the red lines, then do the vertex manip.

http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/1409/splitjv4.png

Use the clip tool for this. Make sure you don't mess that up either.

 

[Pesmerga]

Ew, don't clip.

 

[Vegeta897]

How else do you suggest splitting a brush.

Perhaps you're confusing clip with carve.

 

[Pesmerga]

Anything you can do with clip you can do with vertex manipulation. It's just good practice. Although using clip to split up a brush into two pieces is a useful feature.

 

[Vegeta897]

Which is exactly what we're talking about here.

It's plenty simple and nothing can go wrong, provided you get the split vertexes right on the corners properly and those corners are indeed on grid lines, which they should be already.

 

[Shinobi]

clipping tool is great I use it almost as much as vertex manip

 

[Crispy]

I did this exact same thing last year to make a sloping exit to a multi-storey carpark.

The best way of doing this is with the... argh! I can't remember which one I used in the end but I did some experimenting with both the arch and torus tool and found a solution.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hammer_Arch_Properties
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Hammer_Torus_Properties

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Ah I see you already did the hard bit.

FYI Pesh the best way to go from here is clip the cuboids into triangle-based prisms and then merge the vertices to turn the prisms into pyramids. If you don't use clip you have to copy-paste every single section and manually vertex manip, it would take ages. As long as you clip while they're still at the 'steps' phase it won't screw it up.

The reason you have to do this is because Hammer won't allow a cuboid object to be skewed in more than 2 axes. It will allow this for pyramids.

When you're finished it would be a good idea to enclose the thing in a box and make the upper and lower surfaces into func_details to optimise the brushwork, otherwise they'll cut up the inner and outer walls when you do the BSP compile.