The Ultimate Halo CE Tutorial Index
Going to make a dynamic and more extensive version of Ghost's tutorial index here, including all still-working tutorials from the index as well as any new ones I come across. I will be splitting these up into multiple posts by section in the likely event that all these links will eventually push me past the character limit.
Feel free to make suggestions to tutorials I've missed as I go along.
Also, if any links break, let me know here.
When I can, I will upload any video tutorials to Youtube.
EDIT: This is now also hosted on Modawiki. Thanks, Siliconmaster!
Contents:
Level Creation and Modeling (37, See below)
Character and Biped Modeling, Animating, and Tagging (7)
Vehicle Modeling, Animating, and Tagging (9)
Weapon Modeling, Animating, and Tagging (10)
Scenery Modeling, Animating, and Tagging (5)
Sound Tag Creation (3)
User Interface (UI) Element Creation (10)
Sky Elements Creation (1)
Bitmaps, Textures, and Shaders Creation and Tagging (12)
Single Player Modding/Scripting and Implementation (12)
Miscellaneous Tutorials (22)
Level Creation and Modeling
[HTML: hce.halomaps.org] Official HEK Mapping Tutorial
[VIDEO] Kirks4 - Complete Mapping Tutorial:
- Part 1: Creating a Ground Texture in Paint Shop Pro
- Part 2: Creating the Sky Box in 3DS Max
- Part 3: Modifying the Mountain Boundary
- Part 4: Modifying the Ground Geometry
- Part 5: Modeling and Texturing a Base
- Part 6: Attaching the Base to the Ground
- Part 7: Compiling the Scenario with Tool
- Part 8: Populating the Map in Sapien
- Part 9: Building the Map with Tool
[VIDEO] LlamaJuice - Complete Mapping Tutorial (Youtube only):
- Part 1:
- Part 2:
- Part 3:
- Part 4:
- Part 5:
- Part 6:
- Part 7:
- Part 8:
- Part 9:
- Part 10:
[VIDEO] Firedragon04 - Making an outdoor map
[VIDEO] Massacre - Making Cliffs
[VIDEO] Firedragon04 - Creating an Indoor Forerunner Map
[IMG/TEXT] SnaFuBAR - Quickly Creating Forerunner Structures
Local version of image:
[VIDEO] PopeAK49 - Forerunner Ground Base Tutorial
[VIDEO] ThePlague - Modeling a Basic Human Map
[TEXT] English Mobster - Notes on Human Architecture circa 2552
[PDF] Yayap The Grunt - Beginner's Map Creation Tutorial
[VIDEO] kirks4 - Creating an Underground Tunnel
[VIDEO] Dominator - Basic Base Modeling
[VIDEO] Offspring - Base Modeling using Editable Poly
[VIDEO] Hëlls§¢øÞë - Spline Modeling
[VIDEO] Jahrain - Modeling using Maya
[VIDEO] Jacob Rye - Modeling a Cave in 3DS Max
[TEXT] GUY - Using Box Modeling Techniques
[TEXT] Hailfire - Using Height Maps to Create Terrain
[VIDEO] afridge - Gmax Map Modeling / Level Creation
[VIDEO] afridge - Gmax Texturing & Exporting with Chimp
[PDF] {KaS} Korori - Basic Mapping and Level Creation
[VIDEO] [CAF]Eclips - 3DS Max Basics
[VIDEO] TriggerHappy MC - Adding Glass to Your Creations
[VIDEO] {RtN}spikes - Make Glass With Colors
[VIDEO] Johnomatic - Making Ladders
[VIDEO] {WK}H Guru - Adding Water
[PDF: ghost.halomaps.org] Unknown - Adding an a30-style Waterfall to Your Map
[VIDEO/TEXT] MetKiller Joe - Light Bridge
[VIDEO] {NcS}~Rm - Fixing Geometry Errors
[TEXT/PICTURE] Oscuro - Reducing Triangle Count Effectively
Local version of picture:
[VIDEO] Matooba - Setting up Player Spawns (Youtube only)
[GBX] Xzzy - Portals, Portals, Portals
Local:
Originally Posted by Xzzy
Well all my attempts to acquire some brand of official knowledge on portals came up with a dead end (and I went all the way to Bungie itself on this one, the response I got was interesting, but ultimately unhelpful), so I broke down and spent an evening with a dummy map to try and figure out some of the subtleties a bit.
It was both educating, and frustrating. Still a lot to learn but I gotta get to bed, and need to type all this in before I forget it. A few "rules" of portals that seem to be true:
- Always use exact portals, if you can. They cull much better. My test for this was two identical hallways, with two 90 degree corners. The hall fitted with 3 exactportals did three things better:
1) Kept the skybox from rendering. This was the biggest surprise. Once I got two or three portals "away" from the sky, the skybox no longer got rendered. A potentially important point for people with interior/exterior maps trying to squeak out every bit of efficiency that they can.
2) Didn't "guess". Because they follow edges of the map precisely, the engine can trim off polys much better. I noticed with normal portals, a lot of the time weird patches would get rendered because the Halo engine was incorrectly guessing the PVS (potentially visible set).
3) Halo is much more willing to cull objects behind an exact portal. As soon as a given exact portal is not visible to you, anything behind it is not drawn. With normal portals, whether a space gets drawn or not varies based on coordinates, heading, and random guessing.[*] The contents of a portal are drawn ONLY if part of the portal is visible to you. This is critical to keep in mind because it means when portalling a map, it's not a matter of slicing your map up into blocks and hoping everything comes out right. What you have to do, rather, is enter your map, find a location getting poor FPS, and identify what is getting drawn to slow things down. Then you have to section that area off with portals, taking care that no piece of the portal you are creating is visible from the location you were standing from. Otherwise the portal does no good.[*] That said, sometimes you get lucky. Halo does a semi-decent job of "guessing" the culling, even if sometimes a portal is visible. However, it is prone to guessing wrong and drawing everything, like I said above it depends on coordinates and heading. This can lead to weird laggy spots in your map.[*] Horizontal portals don't seem to do much. I need to make another dummy map to test this better, but from what I've seen so far they just don't plain work well. Not sure why, just wasn't able to get good results. They DO work well when used to "cap" a couple vertical portals, but putting a large horizontal plane in your map won't do diddly.[/list]
Next, I need to investigate how adjacent portals work, all I've done so far is section off pieces of the map to try and get it to dissappear. Need to experiment to find out how a fully "sealed" map behaves.
I also want to see how far I can push exact portals, see if it's possible to portal an outdoor map using them.
If I get time later I'll put my max/scenario files up so people can get visualize a bit how portals work. The moral of the story however is that the portal system shown in the tutorial map with the HEK is nowhere near the best way to set them up. Every map needs custom attention, and a map maker willing to spend some time in wireframe mode to understand how Halo is parsing a map.
[TEXT] Matooba - Portals
Local:
Placement of Portals
The final step to completing a level is the addition of surfaces or planes that define portals. These portals are used by the engine for several purposes.
The primary function of these portals are as "visibility portals", portals that the Halo game engine uses to try and cull out objects that cannot be seen to improve performance by not rendering such objects.
The portals in general help break up the level so that it can be handled in parts to help performance in general. Attributes can also be set for portals, such as ambient sounds to play in the portal as well as environmental audio effects. Portals can also be used to define weather volumes and fog volumes.
There are 2 kinds of portals that are defined, "portals" and "exact portals". The following are descriptions for each:
1) Exact Portals: (Material name: +exactportal) These are portals defined by surfaces or planes with the +exactportal material applied to them. Exact portals are created such that the faces (edges and vertices) match the surrounding geometry (edges and vertices). These faces in effect create a "seal". The volume that is between these surfaces or planes is an exact portal. The direction of the normals of the faces helps determine how the portal is defined.
2) Portals: (Material name: +portal) These are portals defined by surfaces or planes with the +portal material applied to them. These portals are created by faces or planes that are used to divide the game environment. These planes must create a seal with the level, but do not have to match vertices and the associated edges with the surrounding geometry. These planes are much more loosely defined and placed in the level and are used to break or divide the level up into sections. The direction of the normals for the faces helps determine how the portal is defined.
A volume defined as an Exact portal CAN have standard Portal areas defined within it and vice versa as long as the above rules outlined in their definitions are satisfied. However, an open ended or non-enclosed Portal cannot intersect an Exact portal, a "vis error" or rendering anomaly will occur. In other words, be careful to not let a Portal plane improperly divide or bisect an Exact portal volume. Portals can be used to help portal horizontally (looking left and right in the XY plane) AND vertically (looking up and over objects or geometry that vary in the Z-Axis). Later, when the level is running in the Sapien or the game, use rasterizer_wireframe 1 to view the level and exit and enter the doorways to see how the level geometry and objects are not drawn from the player view as this portal volume is entered and exited.
Notes:
Exactportals,
Make sure the normals for the faces point outwards, this will help define the volume between the faces. the normals can be viewed by clicking on the Show Normals check box under Selection. If the normals are not easily visible, the lengths of the visual representations of the normals can be increased using the Scale value. Once this is complete, assign the +exactportal material to the faces by selecting all the faces and setting the Material ID to that of the exactportals.
Portals,
Under Create click on Plane.
Enter the following values in the listed fields, Length Segs: 1 and Width Segs: 5
Create the plane such that the edges extreme edges extend past the extents of the level.
Take this plane and create 3 more planes for a total of 4 planes that run lengthwise "North" to "South".
Convert all the planes into an Editable Mesh (Edit Mesh) and Attach all the planes into 1 object called "terrain portals".
Planes and faces should be aligned to try and divide the level evenly. Vertices and the associated edges and faces should be aligned along major edge boundaries in the level.
Faces running "West" to "East" should be created using the existing vertices and edges for the planes. Only the middle 4 edges and associated vertices should be used. In addition, the edges should be extended past the level boundaries. Make sure that the normals are consistent for all the faces, this will determine how the portal volumes are created. In the example, the faces running "East" to "West" have their normals pointing North, while the faces running "North" to "South" have their normals facing "East".
Link the "terrain portals" object to the reference frame "frame" object.
The level has now been portalled. :P
I hope this will reduce lag in some of those good maps i see out there.
[TEXT] DEEhunter - High Quality Lightmapping
[TEXT] Firescythe - Aether (High-Quality lightmaps)
[VIDEO] Inferno - Getting rid of Phantom BSP
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