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Using the Curved Bridge function ( V1.0 ) Atan

The Build Curved Bridge function is an enhanced version of Build Bridge or Build Smooth Bridge from the World View Room menu. This one will take a few steps more, but you will be able to modify the new bridge before you insert it. This way you'll be able to build 'curved' Rooms now. It's not perfect, but it will do it's job if you learn to handle it. You'll find this function inside D3Edit since [AV41].

I made a little level to show you how it works. I prepared the Room faces as usual, watch the blue marked face from Room 1 and the green selected face from Room 2. This is our usual starting situation.

Don't wonder, I distorted the texture alignment of these rooms to show something different later.

Now open the Room menu in World View and choose 'Build Curved Bridge'

Switch to Room View because you will do all needed operations there.

The best is to view all four windows. The new pseudo Room will look like this one here:

Inside the Grid Views you see red and blue pseudo vertices. The blue ones are the current segment, I'll come back to them later. Inside the Perspective View you see the pseudo faces, means how the new room, your bridge, will look like if operation would be finished now. If the result was twisted, you could try to use the Keyboard '-' key to swap base faces verts. If the pseudo room would look like you want it just now, you could hit the 'Insert' key to generate the real room now. But that isn't what we want to do now, we would like to see how to modify the pseudo room first. Ok, let's see how to do this.

The first thing is to see how many segments we would like to own. You can choose between 3 and 200.

More will make curves smoother, but will produce many faces which must be textured and aligned.

Try out what will do the best for your bridge.

Above you see the minimum of 3 segments.

And this picture shows some more.

Ok, let's start to modify the pseudo room now:

Look to the two white filled circles. Keyboard 'N' /Shift 'N' will cycle between both. The current one looks bigger. Numpad 2/4/6/8 will move these current point in selected grid window depending on selected grid as usual. There is no error check, you will be able to move behind the base faces, construct wild wild things, but this make no sense. Use your brain and watch inside Perspective View and/or World View what you are doing carefully.

If you dislike all you did, you may hit the keyboard 'Pause' key twice. This will reset the pseudo room. The segment count is unchanged this way. If you would give it a try now, hit the 'Insert' key to generate the room. Remember that you can delete this room later and give it a new try.

This would be the resulting room in this case. You see that you got what the pseudo room showed you before.

All new faces got the Current Texture and aligned by Face Map. All faces are marked so you could change the texture if you want now. I'll show an other reason to leave them marked below.

The result viewing in World View:

Remember that I distorted the textures inside room 0 and 1? Now we can use Propagate to align the textures between the rooms. To save the current room texture alignment I set 'Ignore marked neighbors'. We need to set 'Propagate through portals' and to select a bordering face (white arrow above) in the new room. Don't click into any other rooms, this would unmark the faces! But if you really did something wrong, no problem. There is a new function inside Texture Align called 'Copy Current UV to marked' which I'll show you at the end of this tutorial. For now let's go ahead with Propagate. The next picture show the result if you use it.

Now I will show you what the current segment (blue pseudo verts) could be used for.

Use the keyboard 'B' /Shift 'B' to cycle through the segments.

The Numpad keys 1/3 will rotate the segments depending the selected Grid View and grid.

This example shows what will happen if you rotate a segment in Side View.

If you want to move the segment by Numpad 2/4/6/8 you have to use them together with

the 'Ctrl' key.

Remember: Using one of these keys without 'Ctrl' will move the current white point and reset any segment rotating or segment moving done before.

Above I told about the new function 'Copy Current UV to marked' inside the Text Align Dialog.

It will copy the current face U V's to all marked faces with the same count of verts.

No need to tick Marked face(s) and this function will not stop if there are faces marked with more vertices, it will just ignore them. Align the current face as you want, then mark all faces you would like to be affected.

Then hit the 'Copy Current UV to marked' Button. The result:

This Curved Bridge function will produce no wonder, but used with a good eye you may be able to do some curved rooms now. Think about the room center. If your 'curve' is too wild you will run into sound problems and the tunnel deforms too much. Better produce two or three separate Rooms as part of a curve then.

There is a second way to use this function.

For example: Mark two faces in Room View and copy them to clipboard. Create a new room and paste the two faces into that new Room. Press the 'Pause' key. Now you can work the same way as described above.

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