Working with the Element Viewer
Warning:The Element Viewer is very powerful, and has very few safeguards. If you use it incorrectly, you can irretrievably corrupt your scene and crash the SFM. It's a good idea to stay out of it until you are sure you understand what you're doing. Here be dragons.Working with multiple maps
If you want to use different maps in different shots, you can. But instead of specifying a map at the sequence level, you must specify maps at the shot level every time you want to change maps. Because a sequence-level map will override any shot-level map, you must also delete the reference to the sequence map. When you export your movie, the SFM will unload and load maps between shots that use different maps, which can take some time.
Note:Your session can display only one map at a time. If you want to scrub through a shot with a different map to see how it looks, you can load the new map with Ctrl+L. Before exporting a movie with multiple maps, make sure to delete the sequence map reference.To use a different map in a shot:
- Open the shot in the Element Viewer.
- Click the browse button (
) next to mapname. - Choose the map you want to use in that shot, and click Open.
To delete the sequence map reference:
- In the Element Viewer, go to the sequence level, and expand the activeClip. You can get to the sequence level from a shot by clicking the up arrow at the top of the panel.
- Select the text next to mapname and delete it.
Instead of using different maps in different shots and dealing with the load times during export, you have a couple of options. You can use the Hammer Editor to build a single map out of the pieces of the maps you want to use. That way, different shots can look like they're using different maps, even when they're not.
Alternatively, you can use a single map and, in different locations on that map, build "sets" out of props and models, basically turning them into level geometry. You do this by adding animation sets for them as you would for any other object. If you do this, however, you will probably want to make those animation sets unselectable and hidden by right-clicking the animation sets in the Animation Set Editor and selecting those options. Otherwise, if you try to lasso-select an object in the viewport, you may end up inadvertently selecting background elements too.