Quake3World

What would be the best way to make a curved or spiral staircase? I've been having some trouble with this for a bit of time so i though i would ask. A link to a tutorial would be great!

There's a German tool for doing it automatically, but the good ol' manual way still gives the best control over getting exactly what you want. This assumes you know the basics of map making...

1. Create the guiding path of the staircase. This is done with the help of 2 cylinders (or bevels if prefered).

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image1.jpg[/lvlshot]

2. Use patchmeshes to get the angles for each step. Over here I'm using 22.5 (well 23 actually) degree increment. The angle you use depends on the length you want your staircase to be and the height you want it to reach.

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image3.jpg[/lvlshot]

3. Make the steps by using the intersections between the meshes as guides. You can use either brushwork, patches or a combination of both to do this. Use smaller grids depending on how accurate you want it to be - I'm using Grid1 here. If you're using brushes then have caulk applied to them.

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image8.jpg[/lvlshot]

4. Push each step higher than the previous to make them into actual steps. Here we've got 4 steps which make up 90 degrees. Since 4 steps in this tutorial make up 90 degrees we can just clone it if we want a 180/270/360 degree spiral. Group it and set as detail (if you're using brushes).

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image9.jpg[/lvlshot]

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image10.jpg[/lvlshot]

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image12.jpg[/lvlshot]

5. Texture all visible faces as usual, delete the meshes.

[lvlshot]http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx87/TheMuffinMan86/Spiral%20Staircase%20Tutorial/Image13.jpg[/lvlshot]

Thanks muffin, this was very helpful and greatly appreciated! I have the hang of it and plan on implementing the design into a map I've been working on.

I prefer to do this with the polybuilder:



Create a square brush, click the tool while the brush is selected, enable "Use Border" define the step's width with "Border Width" and that's it. If needed, snap the vertices of your staircase with CTRL+G to the grid after creation. Then just drag the single segments to different heights and youre done

DaEngineer wrote:I prefer to do this with the polybuilder:

I can not seem to find the polybuilder, and for that matter, cant seem to find any of the buttons in that row anywhere. It's not a big problem for me at this moment in time though, because Muffin's response worked well enough for my needs. PS: If you were wondering, yes I am pretty new at this.

Probably depends on the Radiant version you are using. I use 1.5 (with no additional plugins installed).

I'm using the same version... O.o I must be overlooking something

Preferences Layout Plugin Toolbar

Kaz wrote:Preferences Layout Plugin Toolbar

I already had that checked, It's not a plugin I have to get somewhere, right? I'm just using it "vanilla" at the moment..

I recently came across a staircase generation tool called Q3StairGen2 made by Drewfin. It can produce spiral and standard staircases plus railings and has all sorts of tweaky bits. Note that it is a Windows application, but ran just dandy for me under Wine in OS X and I assume will work similarly in Linux.

You can find more info in the Urban Terror Forums at http://www.urbanterror.info/forums/topi ... rway-tool/ or download directly from http://monkeytrucker.net/urt/q3stairgen.zip

dervish wrote:

Kaz wrote:Preferences Layout Plugin Toolbar

I already had that checked, It's not a plugin I have to get somewhere, right? I'm just using it "vanilla" at the moment..

Oh, my bad

its no problem, i appreciate you trying to help me out though