2.1. Creating Preset files

Name Convention for Preset Files

Per default MyMapFile.txt is linked to MyMapFile.map

A preset file needs to have the same name as the input map file for M2C to know which belongs to which. This can be overridden by using the “source” command and specifying an alternative input map file path.

Overriding source map

Now MyMapFile.txt is linked to MyCustomSourceMap.map

Specifying Curves in a Preset File

As there can be multiple curve objects defined in a preset file, M2C needs to know how many actual curve objects shall be created. The rad command that controls the curves radius is the indicator for that. Without any rad command in a preset file, the minimum amount of generated curves is 1.

Preset File Structure

Commands and their settings can be anywhere in a preset file. No special placement is necessary. As long as they are not commented out, they will be recognized as such.
As the preset file gets scanned for valid commands, their position of appearance defines to which curve object they belong.

Example #1 – Grouped

Example #2 – Stacked

Setting inheritance

Most settings  of a curve object are being inherited by the following curve objects unless overwritten with another value.

If multiple curve objects were defined in a preset file and all of them are meant to share a certain setting, that setting only needs to be defined once.
The following curve objects then share the settings of the first one, use default values or automatically generate a value from previous values (only works for “res”).
Some commands don’t use this behaviour (e.g. Radius, Offset and Transformation commands).

Comments

Any other text than commands and respective values has to be commented out -> “// Comment”

2.1.1. Examples

Preset File #1

2.2. Command List

Input Output File Settings

General Curve Settings

Advanced Curve Settings

Spline Extrusion

Read more about spline extrusion here.

Transformations

Read more about transformations here.

Detail Objects

Read more about detail objects here.

3.1. Brushes

• Brushwork has to be horizontally aligned along the X-axis and can be anywhere on the map, but should be on the top side of the Y-axis. If some vertices of the map-brushes are below 0 on the Y axis, the source object will always be moved above 0 on the Y-axis for arc generation.
• Cutting Edges have to be planar.
• Slopes along the X-axis will lead to an invalid brush.
• Texture Rotations other than 0, 90, 180, 270, etc. will be automatically aligned to “World”.
• There can be Solid Entities and World Brushes in a Map file.
• Point Entities are being ignored.

3.1.1. Brush Mesh Criteria

Mesh criteria for arc generation:

• No sloped faces along the X-axis.
• Planar cutting edge faces.

Valid brush lengths:

Brushes can have any length on the X-axis.

Some valid brush profiles:

Valid brush profiles for Triangulation:

See section about triangulation.

3.1.2. Brush Positions

Position rules:

Brushes can be anywhere on the map, but will be moved above 0 on the Y-axis before arc generation.

3.2. Texture Rotations/Alignments

Texture-Criteria:

• On body faces (all faces along X-axis) only the texture rotations/alignments: 0,90,180 and 270.
• Cutting edge faces can have any rotation/alignment.
• Each face can have any Scale and Shift.

3.3. Solid Entities

Solid entities are being supported by Map2Curve. It is advised to turn anything into a solid entity (e.g. func_detail or func_wall) for a better brush-handling in the editor.

3.4. Point Entities

Point entities are supported and can be modified along with solid entities as Detail Object Groups.

4.1. Generating Arcs

4.1.1. rad & offset

• “rad 0” will use the original mesh position from the map file, as long as it is above 0. Otherwise, it is moved above 0 on the Y-axis before the arc is being generated.
• Each radius (rad) command in a Map2Curve preset file corresponds to one arc.
• A preset file can consists of only one rad command. Anything else will be filled with default values by the program.
• Each arc defined in a preset file will always use the same base mesh from the loaded map file.

4.1.3. res

• Resolutions for PI Circles are always divisible by 4. Everything else will be rounded by the program.
  At the moment the minimum resolution is 4.
• Resolutions for GRID Circles must be 12, 24, 48, 96, 192 or 384 or the appropiate ID: 1(12)…6(384)

4.1.4. type

Currently there are 3 ways the program generates curves: Pi- and Grid-circles and simple spline extrusion. Each one has its up- and downsides.

Curve Type Properties

Type	Res ID	Minimum Sides	Maximum Sides	Default Sides	Section Length	Precision of Coordinates
Pi Circle	0	4	384	8	equal	floating point
Grid Circle	1	12	384	12	varies	integer floating point
Simple Spline Extrusion	2	Properties depend on input spline…

Pi circle properties

This uses pi to generate the contruction circles. This method will let you “arc” non-rectangular brushes (e.g. pipes), without the need of using triangles.

Upsides:

• Even length of each section
• Perfect circle

Downsides:

• The resulting floating point coordinates are not easy to work with (but can be compiled flawlessly in most cases and can be rounded to integer numbers)

Grid circle properties

This uses a special construction method:
A basic circle with 12 sides and a radius of 128 units is being rotated by 15 degrees, then scaled up to the next major gridline (gridsize is 32). Its vertices are then being snapped to the closest grid crossing. By doing this, the resulting arc brushes will be planar and might even have integer coordinates, which can be handled a lot easier than floating point coordinates of course. One condition for this is a small resolution and/or large grid sizes.

Upsides:

• The coordinates can be integer and are thus very comfortable to work with.
• Cutting edges are easier to work with.

Downsides:

• When arcing smaller brushes at high resolutions floating point coordinates (e.g. 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, etc.) are possible and can’t be rounded to integer numbers that easily without deforming the mesh and making this type of construction pointless.
• Not a perfect circle, rather oval.
• Sections don’t share the same length.

Simple spline properties

See the section about spline extrusion.

4.1.5. round

• The original generated vertice coordinates have floating point precision and are thus off grid.
• “Round 1” rounds these coordinates to integer numbers, which can be handled easier in an Editor because they are on grid.

Attention: Rounding the coordinates of brushes with sloped faces, like Cylinders, might lead to invalid solids, messed up meshes and/or faulty compilation! You can avoid this by triangulating these brushes.

4.1.6. height

4.2. Generating Ramps

Ramps are created by combining the commands height and ramp.

HEADS UP: Round vertices of sloped triangulated brushwork in case of compilation errors!
When transforming certain brushwork into ramps, it might be a good idea to round the vertices to integer numbers, since the compiler tools really don’t like sloped brushes with floating point coordinates, that are furthermore triangulated. They will probably completely mess them up, resulting in holes and other unlovely errors.
Snapping everything to grid will avoid this in some situations. Maybe not always though, didn’t test it.

• While height adds a custom height (32) to each section…
• …tri 1 splits up the brushes into wedges, which is crucial for the sloped brushes to be loaded flawlessly by a Goldsource map editor.
• ramp 1, in the end, creates the actual ramp, with a linear slope. Ramp 2 would create a smooth slope.

Ramp (Slope) Mode

• ramp 1 creates a linear slope.
• ramp 2 creates a smooth slope.

4.2.1. ramptex

The ramp texture mode defines how textures are being aligned on ramp surfaces, which is not an easy situation for aligning textures in general.
The easiest way to do this is to project the textures onto the ramp from above. This way there will be a certain distortion, but the original shift is being preserved perfectly. You can observe this by using UV Lock in JACK editor.

Ramp Tex Mode

• ramptex 0 Textures are being projected onto the ramps surfaces from an upright angle.
• ramptex 1 Textures are being aligned rectangular on the ramps surfaces. Currently there is no horizontal texture shift available for this mode.

Demonstration of both modes

4.3. Triangulation

• Using Triangulation on an Arc is crucial for ramp generation! As of version 0.2a it is being applied automatically though.
• Triangulation will currently only work on brushes that have 5 or 6 faces (wedges and squares) and an upright front and/or back face!

Valid Brushes

4.4. Texture Shifts

Map2Curve reads texture information from imported brush faces and uses them to calculate the new generated textures, aka rotate them, re-scale them and move them horizontally along the respective brush/arc edges.

In Order to do this, source textures need to meet certain criteria in terms of texture rotations/alignments.
There are several ways textures can be arranged on the generated arc brushes horizontally:

1. Shift 0 [Null] – Simply puts all horizontal texture shifts to “0”.
2. Shift 1 [Per Section] – All faces of a section share the same shift that is based on the longest edge length of that section.
3. Shift 2 [Per Brush] – All faces of a brush share the same shift that is based on the longest edge length of that brush.
4. Shift 3 [Per Brush Texture] – All faces of a brush, that share the same texture, will have the same shift, based on the longest edge length of that brush-texture.
5. Shift 4 [Align Left] – All faces of a section are aligned to the left corner of this section.
6. Shift 5 [Align Per Group Texture] – All faces of a solid entity group, that share the same texture, will have the same shift, based on the longest edge length of that group-texture.

4.5. Exporting as OBJ

OBJ is a 3D model exchange format. It can be imported and/or viewed in potentially any available 3D software.
Exporting a generated arc or ramp to OBJ can have multiple reasons and benefits. You might want to use it as reference when animating scenes in an external 3D software, other than a classic Goldsource editor.

4.6. Spline Extrusion

As of version 0.3 Map2Curve can extrude brushes along a spline, that for example is made of path_corners and was created with a path tool such as the one in Hammer Editor. Since JACKs path editing tool is a lot easier to use, I can recommend it for this purpose.

Requirements for spline extrusion

• To extrude something along a custom spline you have to use “type 2” for this curve object.
• The spline needs to be put in a separate file, that has the same name as the file, that contains the source brushes, but with a “_path1.map” added to it, where “1” specifies the ID of the curve object.
• The path also needs to be made of path_corner entities and must be created with a path tool.
• The direction in which the path is heading is relevant for the later brush align and can be reversed with “p_reverse 1”.
• The offset command can be used on splines, too. It might break the mesh though, if being used with too high numbers.
• Circular splines are not yet supported. If you want to create a circular extrusion from a spline, you need to connect the last section yourself AND add one additional section, to create a correct loop.

Extrusion method explained

Currently there is only one method for the spline extrusion feature. It is a rather simple method, that produces clean brushes, while still offering a good optical quality without the need of triangulation.
It is based on the align of the spline sections. The source brushes cut faces are being rotated relevant to the spline section align (left, right, up, down). Empty corners are simply being filled then, to create an uninterrupted extrusion.

Downsides

Of course there are downsides to this method. It won’t create the best result in every situation. I have included a few settings that might help reduce these issues eventually.
Also it is not suited to extrude brushes, that need to have correct proportions to look authentic. This especially applies to anything that is man-made, while natural structures will still look good or at least okay.

Examples for natural looking spline extrusions

4.6.1. p_cornerfix

Autofilling corners doesn’t always work. More precisely it will only be applied, when the spline turns clockwise. There will be overlapping brushes at some point and mostly this won’t be a big deal. If necessary, “p_cornerfix 1” can be used to resolve this, but it should be kept in mind, that the resulting mesh will differ from the original spline then.

4.6.2. p_reverse

Sometimes it can be very useful to reverse the splines direction. This might already resolve a faulty extrusion. The source brush object might need to be flipped as well, to accomplish the result that was originally intended.

4.6.3. p_split

This controls whether or not the spline is being exported as a whole or gets split up into many smaller pieces, depending on the orientation of the respective segment. This can be very helpful on long splines.

Note: For this to work at all, the source brush needs to be a solid entity. Otherwise only separate world brushes are being exported.