schleicher on 15/5/2017 at 11:38
Hi
To use the grid has very annoying sideeffects. By moving Brushes they
are automatically resized, rotations are cumbersome.
Is there a sort of thumb rule, when it is better, to use gridsnapping and
when one can disclaim the function ?
JarlFrank on 15/5/2017 at 11:50
ALWAYS gridsnap.
A L W A Y S
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If you don't gridsnap, you will get errors and your mission will be borked. Dromed is going to crash and kill your family.
Always snap to grid.
What you can do, however, is to lower the grid size for more precise movements. It's fine to lower grid size to 11 or even 10, but never go below 10 as that will cause problems just as not gridsnapping at all does.
If the re-sizing of brushes annoys you, go to grid size 12 or 11, those allow you to adjust the size of a brush down to 0.25 units. That is the lowest you ever need to go.
Rotating without snapping the rotation to the grid isn't as problematic as moving and resizing brushes without gridsnapping them. What you can do with regards to rotation is to manually change the rotation angle by typing in the desired number.
But you should never disable the grid. Never. Not even once.
marbleman on 15/5/2017 at 12:04
DromEd will just refuse to portalize your level at some point if you ignore the gridsnapping. I prefer to gridsnap all brushes at grid size 11 from time to time just to be sure.
Unna Oertdottir on 15/5/2017 at 12:06
You should snap the brushes to the grid. If you know what you're doing, you can disable the use button and do what you want. There are FMs around in which the authors disabled the grid intentionally to set some brushes in nonaxial angles. If you get red errors in the monolog or coplanar warnings, then you know what's wrong. Remember, you're an beginner. It's easier for you to snap the brushes to the grid. You can set the grid to 11 or even 10 for single brushes.
schleicher on 15/5/2017 at 12:25
Thanks for the answers.
I paused for more than a year working with dromed. I think, i just need more practice :cheeky:
john9818a on 15/5/2017 at 13:12
I snapped all of my brushes except for maybe two that needed to have very specific orientation. So far I've got no errors but I wouldn't use a ton of unsnapped brushes.
Zontik on 15/5/2017 at 14:21
Dromed hates decimals. 0.1 is quite good for him, 0.25 too, 0.125 is acceptable, but 0.5555675 is not.
The good news is that it doesn't bother which decimals you use. 0.25 is completely as good for him as 0.99 or 0.33. So manual typing is your best friend. Type 0.99 if you wish without changing you base grid size 14. It is safe.
But when you reduce your grid size to 10 and see digits like "0.38" in your coordinate windows, never believe! Try to change the last digit (8) to the same one manually, and you'll see you brush moves. It's just rounding.
(There is some way to extend typing windows for 3 decimals: 0.125 instead of 0.13. It is safe too - with manual typing. Nobody needs more.)
Though, you will never get really rounded values of angles without snapping, even when typing them manual. Fortunately it's not too critical.
ZylonBane on 15/5/2017 at 20:23
Grid snapping can be safely ignored if you're doing relatively simple areas that need a lot of irregular brush placement. The Body of the Many level in SS2, a network of organic tunnels, is almost entirely freeform brushwork.
There's nothing magic about being on the grid, it's that grid snapping keeps brushes aligned with each other, so the optimization/portalization phase has an easier time breaking everything down into cells.
LarryG on 15/5/2017 at 21:07
It is easy to get into trouble if you are not careful when you turn off grid snapping. And unfortunately, that trouble may not show up until later when it is a real bear to untangle what went wrong. I think the best advice is to have grid snap on unless you have a very good reason not to.
The LGS modeling advice was to model all the big stuff with a high grid size. Then start refining things with lower grid sizes. From the Building Principles document:
Quote:
Grid snap - DromEd gives you 2 decimal places of resolution to input numbers for sizes, locations, and rotations. Good building never ever needs more resolution than this. This means that all features you build should be bound by multiples of 0.25 feet. If you grid snap all of your features to a grid size of 12, you will be assured that everything lines up to the right resolution. As explained above, you should start building with a larger grid size, such as 14-16 to make sure your larger features can be divided up cleanly multiple times. If you make a room that is 23.25' x 16.75', then when you will have a hard time putting other features exactly in the corners and so on. The same room 24' x 16' will be more flexible and look essentially the same. Note that every operation brush should be grid-snapped. Therefore, you should leave the grid on at all times. The only exception is rotated brushes, which should be grid-snapped whenever possible, but the grid does not offer lots of resolution for rotation amounts, so you may need to go below it at times.
Resolution - DromEd understands amounts less than 0.01, even though it doesn't express them in its dialog boxes. So, for example, a brush may say that it is 4.00 feet wide, but it is really 4.000267 feet wide or something. This can be fixed by grid snapping your brushes. If you leave the grid on at all times, you can be assured that whenever you create a brush, drag a brush with the mouse, or type in a value, that the value you see in the dialog is exact. If you turn the grid off, drag the value in the dialog to change it, or deal with multi-brushed features at all, then you may have subtly unsnapped brushes. To fix them, you should turn the grid on and “touch” them by dragging the brush by a tiny amount. Whenever you do any multibrushing, you should make sure all of your features are grid snapped. One way to do this is by using the following hilight tools: hilight_clear to clear any existing hilights, hilight_check_snap which hilights all unsnapped brushes, and hilight_do_snap which snaps all hilighted brushes to the current grid size. Note that the grid has to be on for these commands to work.
