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HSR adding faces?

by James Dunlap · in Constructor · 09/21/2007 (1:32 pm) · 3 replies

I've been experimenting with HSR on multiple brush types and as far as I can tell HSR is adding faces. When it is turned off the exported faces goes down by 700 and goes back up when it is turned on. This doesn't seem to make sense to me. Any ideas?
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Associate Matt Fairfax
Night Heron Games
#1
09/21/2007 (4:32 pm)
In order to do HSR the bsp process quite often has to split up existing faces.

So you have to ask yourself, "Is it worth splitting my visible surfaces up into 3 new faces to get rid on one hidden face?" Sometimes it won't split up the visible faces, sometimes you can get rid of more than one hidden face.

It largely depends on your geometry. It is also why detail brushes are important (they keep specific brushes from performing HSR rather than turning it off globally).

The other gain that HSR gets you is a graceful handling of coplanar, overlapping surfaces (like overlapping brushes in a doorframe...stuff you will see z-fighting on in Constructor). Without HSR you have to deal with these cases by hand.

A *lot* of the geometry and lighting problems/bugs I see come from the community are actually misunderstanding the use of HSR and a lack of knowledge/experience with detail brushes.

Employee David Montgomery-Blake
David MontgomeryBlake
#2
09/21/2007 (7:42 pm)
I know that I would like a good explanation of both and their implementation. I *know* that a lot of my ignorance stems from this (as well as other things that I know little of), and I have this feeling that I'm sometimes helping spread that ignorance.

Torque Owner James Dunlap
#3
09/21/2007 (8:34 pm)
That sounds like

I've been trying to get a better grasp of when to use detail brushes and when not to. Currently the structures I am working on have no real (view obstructing) enclosures so I can't see a reason to portalize it. If I am not portalizing it, doesn't it make sense to use all detail brushes? I've probably got a sloppily put together interior but it changing to detail brushes took 700 faces of the interior.