Brushed vs Textures


(saigo) #1

Hi guys!

Since I am building an ET map and it’s way bigger than my last one, I have a quick question about portals, brushes and textures in the aspect of using resources.

I was wondering. Which takes more resource, extra brushes or textures that are on the side of the brushes you can’t see.

basically the situation that I am asking about is ->

I am building an item. And it uses quite a many brushes, because it’s built in a weird angle. Anyhow I was wondering that which is better solution, building so, that some longer brushes, which will be covered up in some places are in one piece and used one texture, or clipped apart, so the textures won’t be drawn behind some areas where you can’t see them anyhow?

Its related to portals too if I’m not wrong, because some of them are structural brushes.

Saigo


(Avoc) #2

I don’t believe anyone can give you a clear answer - but since most people have a modern graphics card with at least 512mb of video RAM, you shouldn’t worry too much about textures.

An extra brush can give up to 12tris (if each side is textured) and that is more important to keep under control considering the Q3 engine is not too good in handling huge amounts of tris or open areas.

As a rule of thumb, you should never have any textures painted on brushes that you cannot see, since the engine will still draw them if they are not properly -vis blocked.


(Krischan) #3

My experience with the Q3 Engine and my background in 3D programming is:

  • it is important to keep the SURFACE count low (below 250 in total?), and Shaders are surfaces*2 !
  • you can have thousands TRIS from brushwork and it will still run fast if you only use a few surfaces
  • but the Q3 Engine has some limits there, so keep the brushes below 10.000, max. 15.000 for a fast map - if this is not possible, the map could be too big/detailed
  • I prefer detailed textures to simulate brushwork and specially “combined” textures to save surfaces
  • for example: I don’t use 8 different separate window or door textures, I combine all of them them to fit on regular grid of a single 512x512 texture
  • so I must only move the UVs coordinates and it is much easier to put the textures on a brush
  • I use the same technique for building walls and framework with variations, textures can be odd shaped like 256x1024
  • VIS blocking is the key to fast maps, you should build your map out of some very big structural brushes first and experiment with them and hint brushes
  • later, you can attach detail brushes to the “walls” of the structural brushes like plaster to maintain the VIS blocking

In my FFM map I had to learn these rules, that’s one reason why I’m working for years on it now - I started over and over again :-p But it is running with at least 125FPS constantly now on my old laptop with a Core2 P9500 / nVidia Geforce 9600M GT. Even on a Lenovo X60 Business Thinkpad with an old Ati card (don’t remember which one) it had at least 60 FPS! Has 6000 brushes and 220 surfaces now.

Example of a combined texture:


(saigo) #4

Ok!

So far I have been using only the textures that was in the main .pk3 package, so The amount of different textures isn’t definitely the problem. I was just wondering that in some occasions I’m not sure, would it make more sense to clip the brush so I could remove the texture from the places you can’t see it any how, or would it be better if I won’t do it.

I realize that 1 this kind of occasion won’t make a big difference, but if you get a lot of those over the time, it would probably save some resource if you would know which way to go.

At the moment I am standing on approximately 5000 brushes, so we will see! :stuck_out_tongue:

Any other good tips about saving resources on map?

Saigo