Quake III: Arena

Making a Spiral Stairway - Jon Eriksson

I was asked how to make a wall around a spiral stairway, and since I wasn't able to explain it without pictures (thats definitely hard :) I wrote this tutorial. Enjoy :)

STEP 1: Lets say weve got a map like this. You should be able to recognize that the wall around the stair consists of brushes. brushes? yeah right. and im gonna tell u how to replace them with a curved patch (that sounds better, looks better and even IS better ;)

STEP 2: Now delete those ugly boxes and put in a brush into an empty space. Why? Its less chaotic as you will see in the next step.

STEP 3: We need a patch not a brush, right? Now select "Curve|Simple Patch Mesh". 3x3? no thats not enough...Choose 3x9 and confirm.

STEP 4: Put the curve onto the place where the wall is gonna begin. You must be absolutely sure that *all* vectors of the patch mesh lay on the grid, or else you cannot edit it.

Now...lets go to the texturing: First make something like this :

STEP 5: Now press [V] to enter the vector edit mode. build something like this but make **absolute** sure that the vectors are on the grid b4 u start!

You will notice the white mark in this pic. I think its easier for you not to put the starting points of the patch at the same place as the ending points as you will have to seperate them again and thats kinda tricky.

STEP 6: Now its easy... goto the top view and select 3 points (in the topview u only see a single 1 of course!) and pull them down in one of the other 2D views. Now take another 3 till uve done all of them.

In this pic you see the curved brush as ive done it :] Its not finished yet (just a draft for this tut). but you can align your vectors a bit better (stay on the grid!) and make the wall higher so that it fits this stair.

Have fun making spiral stairways =)