So far it seems the actual brushwork isn't a problem, lighting is the thing that I'm having to relearn, although it's not really that different either. I was surprised it has no surface lights / flags. But OK, every light is a volume now. All right, grokked that. Would be nice if I was able to do spotlights though.

And gosh, do the testmaps look good ingame. The engine and the default materials are incredible.

I got a clean materials pakfile from the net, but it stopped working after I unpacked all of my pk4s - I had to do that because RoE wasn't loading some files for lowercase reasons (linux).

I should probably get one of those prefab collections as well. 

0.5 is the default tex size. all the textures were made double sized, like q3 before it.

as for caulk, the most straightforward uses of caulk are for brushwork behind patches (like curving walls and such) because patches don't seal the world and also to create box rooms which you can place a mapobject room inside.
most of the base maps in d3 have examples of the first reason (patches) and the hell maps are almost entirely made out of mapobjects. 

Ah, OK. That makes sense.

Apparently DarkRadiant has the light editing functions added and also runs under Linux. I might have to try that.

I never made a Q3 map, I don't even own it. :-E 

This looks very good. Cheers for mentioning it!
Will try if it can be set up for Q4, too. 

Looks a good bit o' neat it does. Now I REALLY want to solve my Doom 3 problems so I can start mappins for it. 

Too bad DR doesn't support Quake :-/

The clean materials pack is very useful, it removes all the broken materials / repairs them to a large degree. Pretty much mandatory. Doesn't work with RoE though.

Now to find out how to set up one of those sentry bots... and spawn some imps. >:-)

Doom3 speedmapping?

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/unidentified.jpg

Tossing around with something Enpro-like. So much easier to make pipes in Doom3 than in Quake. 

if you're looking for textures, lunaran made a great set called strombine (that works in d3 once you swap the material commands to d3 equivalents): http://www.lunaran.com/page.php?id=8

has some nice concretes and metals. 

Thanks for the link. It looks like there's some good stuff there. I'm just familiarizing myself with the stock textures atm - there's quite a lot of them. 

Congrats gb, you made a room that looks like any other Doom3/Quake4 related room. 

How dare you not make the most original architecture ever in a game engine you're working with for the first time??? 

Luke(gb) you have the force, you are just in the wrong path 

It looks like Doom 3? Good, that was kinda my goal :-P 

It looks like a combination of tools is the way to go with Doom 3, ie. build the basic geometry and place the basic lights and entities in GTKRadiant or DarkRadiant, and use D3edit (under wine, if necessary) and Blender etc. as needed and to fine tune stuff like spotlights, and GUIs etc., although like Quake, Doom's .map format is plain text and you should be able to use a text editor to create anything that's still missing. Learning how things like GUIs and movers work is the biggest hurdle, but there is a lot of info out there (doom3world.org, katsbits) and once you have grokked it you should be able to write the stuff you need.

I hope. :-E

Resources:

About lighting:

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech/dynamic-lighting-principles.php

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtech/dynamic-outdoor-lighting-techniques.php

Clean Materials pack:

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6025

(if the links are dead, I have it and can upload it)

Common prefabs (although you can probably rip stuff out of the original maps and use that as a starting point, as with handrails, consoles, movers and guis):

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14677

Hi-res replacement textures project (insane):

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23332

This last one is a reason to largely use the original textures, since your maps will then profit from replacement textures as time goes on.

Lots of the links at doom3world.org are dead, though. 

http://doom3-hr.com/Main_Eng.html

Hi-res texturing project site. 

You guys are going to make me re-install Doom 3, aren't you? :) 

on prefab rails:

doom3 is remarkably weird when it comes to prefabs. some areas have full mapobject (prefab) railing, some areas have railing completely made out of patches (more common) and some are a mix and match.

i would find it more easy to make railing in 3ds max (you can just use the spline tool and don't need to fiddle with ugly patches). thankfully, doomedit has a feature to export brushwork as an obj so you just need to import the the obj brushwork into your 3d editor, make your railing and export. 

Good tip necros. The prefabs are largely a bit questionable anyway, since you can make a lot of things yourself in a matter of minutes... I guess prefabs can be useful for things like shelves, ladder/handrail combinations, typical lifts, and maybe certain GUIs. The computer/console arrangements are probably also handy to have a prefab for, and just modify that, since they look a little time consuming to get exactly right. A lot of common things already come as entities, I saw.

People have been saying that you can also start making terrain out of patches, then export that and tweak / reduce polycount in a modelling suite, then re-import as a mapobject. 

more on prefabs,
a lot of computers and machines are prefabs and an even larger number are not. when i first started, i kept searching through all the models looking for things i'd seen and coming up empty.
in the 'objects' category of textures, you'll find textures that can be used (unsurprisingly) to make objects out of brushwork. a lot of the fancy consoles were built this way with patches and brushes.

about terrain,
i personally find it stupid to make terrain with patches if you've got access to a 3d editing suite. i have an old version of bryce (version 3) that i use as a fractal terrain generator. i export the greyscale heightmap bitmaps into 3ds max and use the 'displace' modifier on a plane that has been subdivided. this yields a terrain that can be modified for higher or lower resolution.
tbh, since i skipped the quake3 era of mapping and went straight from quake to d3, i never became attached to patches like those guys who did a lot of q3 mapping and i can't stand them at all. they are incredibly fiddly and texturing them is an absolute pain. i build everything out of models when i can. besides, building things out of models and then blocking out the area behind with caulk makes vising and portals much easier to handle because the surrounding brushwork is so simple. 

good advice, thank you. 

gb: Thanks. Do I just put the clean.pk4s in the base directory or do I have to rename/unpack them?

necros: Rails aren't the problem. But it kind of sucks that all interesting shapes (rocks, flesh, outsides) are made of meshes and can't be made inside the editor easily, like in Source games. 

Anyone know how I can make models from Quoth custom map objects move (like a body sliding along the floor or something)? I seem to recall seeing it somewhere :E 

negke: I think you should rename the clean materials pak to zzzwhatever.pk4, so it is loaded after all the normal paks (alphabetically sorted). It goes in the base folder.

I unpacked the models/ folder from one of the pakfiles because it has the mapobjects, and you'll probably want to unpack the sounds as well.

Individual files override things in pk4s. 

Ne_tower by Necros was Quoth-based and had a body dragging. He should be able to fill you in. 

as for the knight drag, it's actually from when preach coded in model support. previously, you couldn't assign a model to a func_ because the game would complain about not having it precached.
there was supposed to be a func_train_point made specifically for assigning models, which is what i would have used, but that entity is actually broken, because it's still coded to set the func_train_point as SOLID_BSP which is not allowed with a .mdl (or external bsp afaik), so the dragging knight is actually a func_rotate_train (which is never solid).

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60352&start=36 

was made with a func_rotate_train.
preach added the ability to assign a model to (i think?) every entity.

unfortunately, he didn't allow for models on entities that have SOLID_BSP (ie: func_train) which is why you can't use a func_train for this.

it's been a year, so i don't really remember the specifics, but essentially, you set up a func_rotate_train + path_rotate entities exactly like you would if you were building a rotating train path, except you don't specify any rotation (but you could, if you wanted to-- the model will rotate just like it would if it was a bmodel).
once your rotating train entity and paths are set up, just set the 'model' key to the path to your custom model. finally, on your func_rotate_train, set the target field to 'null' (or anything that is not used). this is because the entity does not work unless target is set, but since we have the model directly on the train, we don't need to target anything.

you can also tie custom models (via mapobject_custom) to bmodel movers via rotating entity functionality as well. you could, for example, make a lift with torches attached to it. note that you'd need to use mapobject_custom instead of the normal torch entities because torch entities are made into static entities and static entities cannot move and they also automatically emit the fire sound which may not be good since they will be moving around.

as you know, you target a func_rotate_* entity to rotate_object entities in order for those to rotate.
you can also target any other entity in the game (including monsters!) and the rotating entity will also move them as well. for an example of this, check out sm156: http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60375 for a map which uses this behaviour.
there are two boats that drive around with rocketeers stuck inside them with the rotate_train trick so they don't fall out as well as droles attached to a flying airplane type func_rotate_train.
i posted the map source for it in post #10 of the thread (or just get it here: http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/sm156_necros_map.zip ).