How to use VisGroups
by polooffer

      The VisGroup tools is for the convinience of mappers. When a lot of brushwork makes the work complex it can become difficult to maintain the big picture. With VisGroups you can make any part of the map you don't want to look at invisible in valve hammer. Also it gives the members of the group the same wireframe color. A table made of 5 brushes can be forced to have the same color for all 5 brushes. The main window for the tool is called "Filter Control". It shows all groups (in this case none) and the buttons used. You can open "Filter Control" from View|Screen Elements|Filter Control.

      For explaining purposes I have made a table. Note how the wireframe is made of different colors and hard to see.

      Using the "edit"-button from "Filter Control" brings out the "Object Groups"-window. It is used for managing the groups.

      I want my table to have its own group so I choose "new group"

      For this simple example the name "table" is fine but having a lot of groups you might wanna be a bit more creative. I want the wireframe color of my table to be yellow so I choose it to be.

      Now that the group has been created we must add the objects to it. This is done using "Object Properties". choosing the group and closing the window.

      That is it. The table has been added to the table-group and now apears yellow in the wireframe.

      If you want to make the objects in the table-group invisible you click the little black pointing finger next to the group name in the "Filter Control"-window and click apply.

      Clicking the same spot again brings back the finger so you can make it visible again.

      This might not be useful for tables but buyzone, bombtargets and sky brushes is normally annoying to look at as you make little changes to it.

      Mark is used if you want to select all items in a VisGroup. Purge is used if you have an empty group and you want to delete it.

      The VisGroups has got no influence on the compiling process and is not to be compared with the Vis from compiling.

thanks goes to

      m`TK and ofcause Egir

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