Quake3World

Is it possible to clip a patch mesh to make an opening into the mountain shown below, or should I use multiple patch meshes and try to align the textures?

ps. Hope everyone is not getting annoyed with my questions.

use multiple patch meshes and try to align the textures

and turn on anisotropic filtering while you're at it

As said, use more than a single, I think you need 8 here to make it look good and snap correct. Select all patches and align the texture correct.

That's gonna be one hell of a job with patches.

Not only getting the textures aligned, but avoiding LOD-cracks, also.

(LOD = Level Of Detail: the way patches are drawn in-game depends on what location you see them from (further away means less polygons).
Patches must join other geometry in a certain way for no cracks to appear.)

I'd just try using brushwork instead of the patches. Gonna be blocky, but solid.

Plan B wrote:I'd just try using brushwork instead of the patches. Gonna be blocky, but solid.

Absolutely! TBH patch terrain usually looks like crap anyway, it seems unnaturally even and lifeless. Brushes or a model is the way to go.

In the long run, brushes are going to be easier. Or if you're a lazy nut, convert the patches to a model and cut out the holes in a modeling program. Tweak as necessary.

Terrain made from brushes is best but if you really need to use patches then I would suggest you create a simple 3x3 patch and drag the middle into the corners. making it a 2x2 patch. make a buch of these, this way LOD has no effect and it may be easier to make whatever shape you need without having to 3 point clip or using a terraing generator. Corsair is the first person ive seen do this, came out nice.

isn't there a way to select patches and set them to never LOD? I remember something like this (from q3map2 maybe), and I was sort of counting on this feature still working.

You can compile a bsp containing just the patches you want, baked with the desired -patchmeta level, then convert that to an .ase that you can use as a mapmodel (after tidying it up a bit in a modeling app) to prevent LODing.

That's not necessary. -patchmeta alone will "bake" patch geometry into the bsp, and it won't be affected by lod.

Technically yes, however that will bake ALL the meshes, and I assume from unitool's post that he only wants to fix the ones with troublesome LOD behaviour. Baking the whole BSP is a nice lazy fix if you don't care about letting any curves LOD though.