Vertex Slopes Are Powerful and Easy

So what are vertex slopes? The name is quite self-explanatory – as the name describes, these are slopes controlled by the vertexes.

If you have had any experience in 3D modelling you’ll know everything can be made with triangles – fortunately the same concept applies here. We’ll start off by drawing a series of triangular sectors. These can be any dimension, they can be any ‘type of triangle’, as long as it’s 3 sided (that is, the sectors you want to slope only ever have 3 vertices.

For simplicity’s sake while learning, I’d create a grid of triangles as seen below. Once done you’ll have created a ‘mesh’ of sorts. You can now control the heights of each vertex, which in many ways is similar to how ‘proper terrain’ is done in 3D modelling!

So you’ve set up your grid of triangular sectors, opened the 3D editor mode and wait… What’s this? Some weird blue handles have appeared! These handles are what control vertex slopes. You should now see something similar to the below:

You can select them with left mouse click, and using the mousewheel you can control their vertical height. In addition to this you can select multiple vertex slope handles and control them at the same time! – See demonstration below.

As you can see the whole effect is easy to use! It can become difficult when you’re trying to draw additional geometry around it, such as bridges or ceiling lights etc, but that’s all part of the fun of mapping.

Check out the below cavernous areas I’ve made to see some examples of what can be achieved using this technique.

Considerations When Using Vertex Slopes

• As awesome as these slopes are, try to be careful with them – they greatly increase the sector count and because of such a large number of them will make the game lag a lot on lower end machines.
• In addition to this, floor slopes can be awful, as it makes the movement for the player become bumpy and/or slippery, making the gameplay take a negative hit.
• Try to care for the textures used on your slopes. By default the texture will stretch with the slope’s shape – the greater the angle the more the texture warps. To beat this, you can use “texture scaling” in the sector options to manually adjust, but this can get very tricky and time consuming.
• Try to leave the vertex slopes until the very end of a map. If you decide later on you want to add additional features in the area you’ve ‘sloped up’ you may find it both time consuming and tedious.