Optimized first room

The main goal of this short tutorial is to give you the keys to building a clean and FPS optimized room with Radiant.

Before you start

As the goal is to have the most FPS friendly map possible, we first need to take care of some settings. The caulk shader is one of the most important here; when adding a new brush, it should always be textured with the caulk shader in order to avoid useless drawnings made by the engine.

Setting it as the default texture to apply is a good way to avoid having to think about it, in NetRadiant, open the Preferences menu, click the Settings -> Brush entry and check the Always use caulk for new brushes checkbox.

Almost done. when clipping a brush, the last selected texture is applied to the new faces of the brush. In order to avoid this and automatically apply the caulk texture, we need to set another option up: select the Clipper entry of the Preferences menu and check the Clipper tool uses caulk.

It's all about 45 degrees

There is nothing much to say about building an optimized room, the only good thing to know is: avoid the hollow tool and join your brushes with a 45 degrees angle to get the most of a FPS-friendly rendering.

So, here is how to build such a room. At first, after drawning a squared brush, select the Clipper tool. We will only have to use the 2-points clipping technique: select the view which suits your need (the Y,Z view in our case) and click on the far bottom edge to place the 1st point of clipping, then place the 2nd point at exactly 45 degrees. For a 32 units height brush, it's a 4 units offset:

Still in the same view, do the same on the opposite side of the brush then change to the X,Z view and repeat the process on these two sides of the brush:

When the 4 sides have been clipped, we can now duplicate our brush: press the SPACE bar and use the Z-axis Flip tool to put the side upside-down:

Now if you rotate this brush with the Y-axis Flip tool, you will have a perpendicular brush, suitable for a wall:

Repeat the process until you get all your floor, your ceil and your 4 walls. Congrats! You just have done the perfect room :)

As an end note, you may notice that using the 45 degrees edges allows us to restrict the texturing process to visible surfaces only, and thus making the brush FPS-friendly. The example room is available as tuto_optimized_first_room.map.