Hint Brushes..

blackjackel · November 2003

<div class="IPBDescription">quick question</div> do hint brushes, that are textured from all sides, do they work?

or must you have a hint texture on only one side of a brush for it to work?

Zazi · November 2003

Trial and error, bud. I've had it work both ways.

NerdIII · November 2003

nonono, be sparse with hint faces, the other faces should be 'skip' irc. Read some more tutorials on hint planes before you go on because you can make it worse with five unnessecary hint planes. Always think of hint planes as planes that cage in the eye. Whereever you go the engine will only draw what can be seen from behind the hint plane as long as you are behind it. Sometimes the compile tools can't find out where it's best to 'cage in' the eye and hint planes are set too far out of a room so if the eye approached them it could see the next room forcing the HL engine to render it whenever the eye is behind this unoptimized plane.
If you manually add hint planes you will not remove those the tools already create, but you give the engine more 'cages' to choose from that might offer better lines of sight with lower r_speeds. Every HINT plane will cut your architecture (if not already cut) and this will give you slightly higher r_speeds with every plane, so don't use 6 of them on a cube when you just want to cage the eye behind a corner!!

blackjackel · November 2003

well what if i wanna cage an eye on BOTH sides behind a plane? should i use 2 then? or just 1? i read tutorials but they didnt talk about this....

NerdIII · November 2003

Yes that is the way the planes work. They 'cage' the eye on both sides because they really just cut the room/corridor in two parts. So you don't need two planes. You can of course have two HINT sides on one polyhedron if you need two and don't mind that the polyhedron might be oddly shaped and confuse you while mapping <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'> . I usually try to make them as small as possible so they look more like a thick line; like a marker.

KungFuSquirrel · November 2003

I always use full hint brushes, all faces textured in hint. One map I had a 15 minute vis compile time drop to about 10 seconds by placing a single cylindrical hint brush. Smart hint brush placement can be done to fit the architecture and existing poly splits and, as such, not add a single poly to the scene while still optimizing the rendering.

Tequila · November 2003

I'm confused by the need for a cylindrical hint brush, do you think you could describe where you applied it, the shape of the room I mean? I haven't had much experience with hint brushes, and it's about time I got to know them well.

KungFuSquirrel · November 2003

In this particular example I was working on constructing a sort of reconstruction of the HL test chamber. So I had a large number of 12-sided cylinders and arches of varying sizes in a very large cylindrical room. The single hint brush went from the top to bottom of the room and was a 12-sided cylinder matching the largest radius on the test apparatus itself. Doing so defined that volume as a much simpler object for VIS purposes rather than having to deal with all the crazy varying sizes and angled faces and hoo-ha and whatnot (aren't my technical terms the best? <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'> ).

I also used hint brushes in a similar fashion (but not cylindrical, of course <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'> ) in most of the double doorways in Eclipse and Veil, the ones with the little supports in the middle... my description sucks... <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'> But I had disastrous results when I moved all of Eclipse up to fix the z=0 issue and forgot to move my hint brush visgroup. <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'> Fixed that easily enough, though, and I was back to my under 60 second vis compile times and nicely controlled polys. <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'>

wRaven · November 2003

If you do things right, 90% of the time you won't need a hint brush.

KungFuSquirrel · November 2003

Nice roundabout way of saying, "Hey, you don't know what you're doing." <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'>

Really, you're right, most of the time they're not <i>needed</i> per se, but the extra optimizations you can get with careful use of them are often well worth the effort. For example, the test chamber re-creation I mentioned earlier - did I shave off a single poly or anything by adding that one brush? No. But I cut 14 1/2 minutes off the compile time in just one room with just one brush. Hint brushes can really streamline things if used correctly.

Unfortunately, there's the little matter that they're so flaky that no one -does- know how to use them to 100% efficiency, myself or anyone else included. Except maybe Zoner <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'>

Reese · November 2003

So, is there any chance of some kind of tutorial on the use of hint brushes to reduce compile times? I've seen them on using hint brushes to lower the amount of off-screen brushes that are rendered on screen, but this is rather interesting to me. I have yet to experience an absolute need for hint brushes, so I haven't really played with them that much.

NerdIII · November 2003

Yes, interesting use of HINT brushes <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wow.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wow.gif'> . Wait... there was one tutorial that said you should use HINT boxes around oddly shaped objects on wide open areas so the cuts they create don't go all over the floor/ceiling in mad angles. There they used a horse as an example. But I think the most simple explanation is to just create a box around your structure that aligns with its outer vertices. Right? (Are cylinders really that useful? How do VIS times compare when you use a box instead?)
Maybe the main reason for using HINT is really not lower r_speeds, but faster compiles!

Yamazaki · November 2003

Hint brushes can remove the annoying Leaf portal saw into Leaf error that VIS can sometimes produce.

Hint brushes can reduce or eliminate the ugly effects of having curved architecture touching flat surfaces.

Hint brushes can lower your r_speeds by hiding areas that are not visible to the player.

Hint brushes can wash your windows... well, not really.

DanDaMan · November 2003

what I'd really like is a tool to let me manually reconstruct areas of visleafs after the computer does it. Because to be honest, the computer does it really stupidly a lot of the time, especially when dealing with any objects that aren't square. Even with hint brushes, the visleafs still cut things up into ugly shapes unneccesarily.

NerdIII · December 2003

Wasn't there a function in the QuArK 6.4 alpha versions that shows these portals in bsp files?

ProStyle · December 2003

</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Hint brushes can remove the annoying Leaf portal saw into Leaf error that VIS can sometimes produce.

Hint brushes can reduce or eliminate the ugly effects of having curved architecture touching flat surfaces.</td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>

The first statement is just wrong in my experience. The second statement just makes no sense to me.

Erias · December 2003

</span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Hint brushes can remove the annoying Leaf portal saw into Leaf error that VIS can sometimes produce.

Hint brushes can reduce or eliminate the ugly effects of having curved architecture touching flat surfaces.</td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'>

The first statement has worked for me (although eventually I just fixed the architecture instead) and the second statement is, as far as I know, just Not True.

[edit]At least, not <i>entirely</i> true... I thought Hints only split VIS leafs, not wpolys and such as BSP and CSG put all the brushes together. I may be wrong. I'm pretty sure that in the case of funny-shaped wpolys, they'll still slice and dice any flat geometry they're touching, whether there's a HINT around them or not... I mean, everything has to fit together, after all.

Hint Brushes..

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