Mapping at egir.dk

How to make a fountain

by Egir Helgrimson In this tutorial I'll show how to make a fountain. Normally you make fountains and waterfalls from func_convoyers, but there are lots of tutorials about that available from many high quality sites around the world. This technique does not require a func_convoyer, and it does look a bit better in some applications.

Where to make the fountain

I assume that you have all ready made the brushes from which the water shall fall. Mine looks as on the picture below.

Making a water ring

Now we need the make a circle covered with a water texture. Since the circle is going to be a func_rotating, it is important that you do not use special textures, such as those with the prefix ! or SCROLL_. Actually, there is an error in steam, so you can't even use textures named anything with "WATER". There is no texture inside half life.wad that we can use, so I had to make my own (its important that the name differs from !, scroll and water, so I've named it "vand") and looks like the picture below. If you don't want to make your own texture you can download mine from here http://www.egir.dk/files/vhe_fountain.zip. Select that texture.

Select the brush tool

Select arch instead of block.

Drag a 64x64x64 brush and right click on it, and select create object. Now the following window should appear.

Use the values as shown on the above picture. and press OK. As you see on the picture below the brush does not face the right direction.

Rotating the brush 90 degrees around the X-axis will make the circle or ring face the right direction. Press CTRL+M to launch the Transformation tool. Fill in the options as shown below, and press OK.

As you see the ring now faces the right direction.

Move the ring to a the location you want your fountain to be.

Click to see bigger screen shot

Making the origin brush

Now we need to make a origin brush for the water ring to rotate around. Select the origin texture, located in halflife.wad.

Again, select the brush tool.

We had better selecting the default "block" instead of "arch".

Drag a white box in the center of the water ring. Observe the picture below.

Click here to see a bigger screens hot Right click on the white box and select "create brush". Now we have a setup that looks like this:

Making the func_rotating

Select the origin brush and the water ring.

Click to see bigger screen-shot Click the "To Entity" button.

Now the "object proberties" window should appear. In the drop down box, select "func_rotating"

Since my water ring should rotate around the Y-axis (and surprisingly in the reverse direction) the func_rotating should have the following "flags" checked.

In the "class info" tab the following preferences should be filled in.

Attributes	Values	comment
Render Mode	Texture	you could use additive as well, but that tends to light up in the dark.
FX Amount	150	the lower, the more transparent.
Rotation Speed	300	300 seems to look natural in my example

Now we are done. Lets compile and see what it looks like:

I've seen worse B)