A few Details (Part 1)

This first part will be a little short, sorry, I was quite busy this week.

Anyway, today i'm going to add more detail with BSP brushes. I'm going to add things that I will probably go over with static meshes later.

For reference, here's the concept art again:

First we're going to make a trim around the edge of the roof. To do this, we're going to go into geometry mode. Once again, to do this, click on the 3D cube shape in the top left hand corner of the toolbar along the right-hand side of the screen.

Once you have the geometry tools menu open, click on the "Pen" checkbox in the modifiers area. Once you've done this, go to the properties section, and change the extrude depth to 32. Now you can start making your own custom brush.

 Now I'm going to start trimming my roof. Instead of just adding a block, that goes all the way around the roof, I want to add some more depth to it. I'm going to make a subtract brush that goes along the inside of the trim. To use Pen mode, select an area in an orthographic view (I've chosen top-down, because of the shape i'm making) now hit spacebar. You'll notice a red vertex shows up. by hitting spacebar, you've just created this vertex. If you move your mouse to another area, and hit spacebar again, you'll create another vertex. you can keep creating vertexes this way to make your shape. Just remember to always return to your first vertex to finish the shape. There is always a dotted line going between your first vertex, and the one you most recently created.

At this point I will start going around the edge of my roof with the pen tool, leaving 32 units worth of space between the edge of my brush and the edge of the roof.

 I will keep going until I've gone all the way around the roof, and finished my shape.

Once I've finished my shape, I will re-position it, so that the top surface is at the same height as the top
surface of the roof.

 Now i'll hit Ctrl-S to make a subtract brush, and voila! I have a roof with trim!

 You might notice that the square pattern material on the roof now looks weird and out of alignment.
An interesting trick, if this bothers you, is to right click on the surface, go to "select surfaces" select all surfaces (it's at the top) and hit F-5.

 You'll now get what is called the material properties window. Once you're here, go to allignment, select planar, and hit apply. All your materials should now line up properly!

Here's the result. Looks much better right?

The result, already much better looking!

Now i'm going to make that block that has the fan in it on the bottom right hand corner of the roof. This is just another add brush so just look at the picture for the dimensions.

Now I've noticed something. The edge trim doesn't go all the way to the bottom part of the roof! What can I do? No problem. I'll just click on the subtract brush and go into geometry mode again.

Now i'm going to select an edge, like in the image.

Now that I've selected that edge, i'm going to click on the "Split" option. This will split the edge in half, giving me more vertices  to work with.

Now i'm going to do it again, on the lower half of the edge.

Now i will rearrange the vertices like in the image below, and then click the optimize button on the geometry tools menu.

You might notice that nothing has happened in 3D view. this is because we haven't rebuilt the geometry of the map yet. Whenever you make changes to a BSP brush you have to rebuild the geometry.

Some more additive BSP boxes...

A useful tip: If you find you can't properly line up the brush you want, just right-click on one of the corners, it will snap that corner to the grid, and can give you a better chance to line up your brush.

Finally, I'll build the lighting. Now we can see that the roof already looks much more interesting. Next week, it will look even better.