Merging polys

When you made it into a single brush you could rightclick on that brush and do "polygons->merge planar"

It's a piece of KeeK!

You could try the same procedure as descibed above but now do "polygons->separate". Dunno if these things will work in your case. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. When trying to merge planars it seems important that both faces have the same texture and that they're alligned.
I hope some of this is any use to you

It's a piece of KeeK!

I've had problems w/ the right-click "merge coplanar" brush command, namely it doesn't seem to work! So what I do instead is export the brush, then re-import & check the "merge faces" option. That seems to work pretty well.




"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne

Brushes

Not too sure what you guys are doing... a small image helps a lot.

Any amount of brushes can be joined and taken apart by intersection and de-intersection.

I have never seen merge co-planar polys work !!!

The two NEW Ued(2) menu options which appear when the highlighted brush is right-clicked.. Not sure how they work, join or separate... ? No idea.

I can do ALL I need to do witb standard intersection and de-intersection techniques..

Please have a read of this stuff, may help.

http://www.planetunreal.com/realworld/terraintutindex.html

I can even add vertexes to existing brushes with relative ease .

A good example of polygon removal is this...

You make a nice complex brush in the 2d editor say a nice curved tunnel (Extrude around a point).

But you notice that each end has lots of polys that are a pain when you come to texture the end of the tunnel...

What to do... Just rest the end edge of your brush against the side of a BIGGER brush, so they are both touching eachother, then press the de-intersect button, you will find that all the polys at the end are reduced to onw polygon.

Bastard'O

[This message was edited by Bastard'O on Jan 26, 2001 at 19:18.]

Woh Bastard'O that was one big typo. asmll = small I presume?

Oppppps

Yep Kain you are right there, I re-read the message and I can see about six typo's... lol.

Hope ppl can make sense of it... Silly me I can just edit it...

Bastard'O

Bastard'O, you may or may not know about how to use the merge polys tool:

make sure all your polys that you want merged are of the same texture and alignment (ie as floor/ceiling or wall direction) and then right-click on the brush and click polygons->merge. Rebuild, and you have a much lower poly count. Polys->separate does the opposite if you want to configure textures separately. Afterwards you can then do polys merge and it will merge all surfaces of the same texture and alignment.

It is much much simpler than the adding/subtracting method posted on your website.

Hey cool.

After reading all this I figured I would give it a try, since I have been trying to reduce the poly count of imported brushes from MAX.

Odd... but it works for me every time. MAX exports geometry as 3 sided polys. I was able to combine the faces of the imported brush with polygons>merge. Whats odd is that when you look at the brush in wire frame it still shows all the split faces. Yet when I use "stat fps" it's calculating the faces combined, showing a much lower poly count.



This screenshot show what was being calculated as roughly 21 polys for the building alone. After selecting it and doing a polygons>merge and a rebuild... WHAM it's now only 6!! That's including the inside of the door frames that can be seen.
Now maybe to some of you that's old news... but it's exactly the problem I was trying to solve for a client of mine when he asked if I could use all of his 3D Autocad/MAX files.

Just a note... I did not find it true that the textures had to be aligned in order to combine the polys...

Also in regard to MidWinters problem of this:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOO_________OOOOO
OOOOO_________OOOOO
Face1a________Face1b

I was able to split the faces up by first intersecting a brush over this shape (had to mock one up), I deleted the original brush and added the one made from the intersection, then right click and choose the polygons>Separate. The faces are unique now and can each have a different texture/alignment


Over 1 Million Served!

The textures you want merging don't have to be aligned, but they have to have the same alignment (figure that one out if you can.. )

Ummm

I guess your going to have to explain that one to me Kain...


Over 1 Million Served!

Ok, I understand now, cool info guys.

"What you see is NOT what you get" in some cases then...

Kain, I know what you mean regardings the alignment comment.. thanks...

Spooger, Nice to know all these different techniques, the tut way was indeed more work and you end up with complex polygons shapes rather then the vertic EASY editable triangle poly.

Do you know what happens if you edit a merged vertex node ?

Bastard'O

Ummm...

My guess is nothing.

OK I had to try it, you had me wondering!

And I pulled all the Vertices for my doors at odd angles (expecting a crash or something) and took all the vertices for the roof down about 20 units (again expecting maybe a crash).

Then I did a rebuild (was damn sure something would go whacky, Nope)! Everything was perfect!

So it seems that even when you Merge the polys and UED calculates it as a single face for each area... you can still edit the vertices as if it was not even merged. AND I didn't even have to merge it again after all the tweaking, it retained it's setting.

This is real cool!

So am I missing something Bastard'O? I mean, should it have done some crazy thing to me or was your qestion simply that... a question?

You should give it a try, it was actualy pretty fun


Over 1 Million Served!

Nope it wasn't a trick question at all...

I guess I had expected the whole merged poly to become split again into all of its parts.

But if it just unmerges the one which has been moved then that is very cool.

Thanks for doing the test for me/ue...

Are you doing any more texture packs dude... Sheeshh I must get that list of texture artists to BuddyPickle to update the on-line inf manual, I used some of your fine masked textures in the Inf_Shooting_Range trainging level...

Bastard'O

Ahhh OK

Yeah, I was thinking that Ol Bastard'O knew of some horrid results or something... so I tried all sorts of stuff expecting problems.

And maybe I should explain that the ones I moved along the wall only got moved along the direction of the wall. I never tried to pull one out an odd direction that would force the face to have a kink or bend to it. But lets say you have a door cut out in the wall and you later decide you want that door 5 feet over to the left.... well, you can grab the vertices (one at a time, unless someone knows how to grab mulitples at a time... hint hint) and shift them along the wall to the new location. I did not have to merge them again, it kept the solid face information.

Another thing... I did experience some problems when textures did not have the same alignment as you had said I would. The first time I did it, the textures already had been aligned, so it worked without a hitch and I figured that alignment was not an issue, I was wrong.

I also found a process to this merge deal (I love process documentation, it fits my overly logic mind, HAHA, proof that engineers ARE in fact geeks). Anyway, These are the steps and everything works perfect most every time... so far anyway.

A. Build the geometry in Autocad or MAX. Size does NOT matter, I have worked with 2342x956 unit buildings with NO problem. The key is that the units must be to the left of the decimal point, just keep it all on grid and your OK.

B. Export it out as a DXF, this works better coming from MAX than it does Autocad, proof that all DXF filter are NOT all the same (even when they are from the same company). I build in Autocad sometimes and then dump it into MAX, then I go out DXF to the UED.

C. Import it into UnrealEd as a brush and do an add/subtract, whatever.

D. I also found that if you replace the default texture on the brush with one that shows the alignment better, it is much easier to ensure that you get it aligned right. In the "Alignment" section of the "Surface Properties" dialog box you have the 4 options:

1. Align To Floor
2. Wall Direction
3. Wall Pan
4. Unalign

Simply using the first 2 options did not get it aligned right, and I found that if I selected 1, 2 and then 3 that it worked perfect.

E. Rebuild so that the engine will recalculate the new alignment scheme.

F. THEN do the Merge Polys.

Yeah I know, it seems like a lot of steps to take but it goes real fast once you have done it say... a couple... million times. Also, I have yet to have ONE single BSP problem when I do it this way... not ONE! And the poly count is low compared to importing geometry from Autocad or MAX and doing nothing more than dropping it in and textureing it.

WOW!! *Looks back up at all he writes and thinks... damn, maybe I should have just done an online tutorial on Spoogers Place!*


Yeah I have some new texture packs coming out Bastard'O, but it's going to have textures much like the bank map had, more rich and less grungy.

You know... I would consider doing textures for Infiltration... just that no one has ever asked.


Over 1 Million Served!

"merge" ?

Could you be any clealer please ? The first 3 steps are like chinese to me...
Basically what i wanna know is if that's possible to merge polys that penetrate each other (so they're not exactly coplanars i guess) .
[Does what i said make any sense to you?]