Creating a Room

This is an continuation of the "Your First Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Room" tutorial. In this section, you'll learn how to make a room out of the brush you've created. (This article currently doesn't have any images because it has been completely rewritten. Feel free to add what you think is necessary, but remember that sometimes less is more.)

Sealed Rooms

All serious maps consists completely of rooms one way or another. Even outdoor maps are surrounded by so-called "skyboxes". These rooms and boxes are very carefully sealed off from the black void surrounding them to greatly increase performance and to enable something called vvis when compiling. A simple room consists of six brushes: The floor, the ceiling, and the four walls - completely sealing what is within from the void outside.

In order to make a room quickly and easily, you'll first need to know a few more easy brush handling techniques:

Moving Brushes

To move a selected brush, select the Selection Tool and put the mouse pointer over the brush in one of the 2D views, staying clear of the corner handles. The pointer will change into four arrows pointing in all four directions, indicating the option to move. Now, click and drag the brush to where you want it in one of the 2D views. As you release the mouse button, the brush will be moved to that position. 3retetgete 45tt 454t54t54t54 45y54

Cloning Brushes

Instead of having to create new brushes with the Block Tool every time, you can make a copy of an already existing brush by holding down the <shift> key while moving the brush. The brush will remain in its place while the copy will end up at the position you <shift>-dragged the brush to.

Once you learn this technique, you will rarely have to use the Block Tool to create basic brushes -- you will just clone one of the existing brushes when you want a new one.

Deleting Brushes

To be on the safe side, I'll teach you how to delete brushes as well: Just select a brush and press your <Delete> key. That's it.

Building the Room

When you feel confident with these techniques, let's build the room. Remember to not make it too small, as it will be the whole level for this example.

1. Make a brush to use as the floor with the Block Tool.
2. Using to the Selection Tool, <Shift>-drag to clone the floor brush, and move it upwards to create a ceiling of equal size as the floor.
3. Clone another one of the brushes and resize it so that it connects the floor to the ceiling, but only with its inner side. This will not look pretty from the outside of the room, but if the room is completely sealed, the surfaces facing outward will not even be included in the compiled map.
4. Clone this wall brush and drag it to its opposite end, again making sure that it just "leans" against the floor and the ceiling, and not supporting it.
5. Again clone and resize a brush to create a third wall, covering the gap between the floor, the ceiling and the two walls.
6. Clone this brush to the opposite end of the room to create the final wall.
7. Check for any gaps so that you are sure that the room has been completely sealed.

Now onto the next part of the tutorial, Applying Textures.