Game Development Community

Making an invisible ramp to smooth stair traversal

by Clint S. Brewer · in Artist Corner · 02/18/2005 (2:58 pm) · 4 replies

I thought this would be simple... just use a wedge with a null texture and make sure that it lines up with the stairs. make it a detail brush so it doesn't do any unecessary splitting and I'm good to go.

unfortunately I had some wierd problems where it made chunks of my interiour invisible.

my bottom two stairs were visible as they should be but the top two dissappeared in the game.

I could run up the stairs smoothly though, which is good, but I can't get away with missing chunks of geometry :)

any advice?

hmm maybe I should'nt be using detail brushes for it?

maybe I shouldn't be using a wedge, but a plane?

I know this is something that people do all the time, but its the first time I've done it. any help would be appreciated.
thanks.

-clint

#1
02/18/2005 (3:07 pm)
And I just found something that does work.

My stairs were detail brushes for certain reasons.
If I make the stars not be detail brushes, but only let my invisible ramp be a detail brush then it works as expected.

sound familiar?
#2
02/18/2005 (3:10 pm)
Aside:
another very small problem is that I see the characters shadow casting on the null/ invisible geometry...I can think of some fun uses for that 'problem' in the game though.
#3
02/18/2005 (3:14 pm)
Do a plane, the null brush do so the other brushes disapear.
Dont let the null brush come in contact with the stairs.
Something like that .

Edit

All ways are good except the bad ones :)
#4
02/18/2005 (3:33 pm)
Even with my detail wedge where I thought I didn't have a problem, I still had a small problem where there was a sliver of invisible geometry.

thanks Billy, that looks like it will do the trick!

making sure that it doesn't touch the other geometry a very very thin wedge for the ramp.