Offgrid Walls

[HaukeG]

Hello together,

I am wondering how you can create a building with not only 90 degree walls. If I am watching on youtube, they ofter build one piece of a wall (one grid width), decorate that and at the end rotate this in 45 degree. I can only rotate on 90 degree. The only thing I have found out is:

1) Build this one wall piece and decorate it
2) Exit the edit mode of this new building
3) select is by left click
4) hit crtl + d for duplicate

at this point I can rotate this whole thing like I want. But unfortunately I do have two or more buildings at the end. Is that the regular way?

In some videos of Silvarret you can see that he build a wall, but other textures on front and remove the wall. These textures can be free rotated.

But I think I saw some videos with multiple grids in one building.


Thanks,
Hauke

 

[Bullethead]

The trick is to use multiple separate buildings and overlap them to conceal any gaps between them. Within each individual building, all the gridded parts are stuck with the same grid, so can only be at 90^ angles to each other. So create several buildings and move them so they fill the gaps between them. Each building has its own grid alignment, but this does not affect the grid alignments of the other buildings.

Here's an example:



In this pic, the central bastion at top is made of 5 separate buildings. Each different angle of wall is a single separate building, as is the whole floor between all the angled walls. Then each long straight wall is another building, followed by 4 more buildings for each wing half-bastion, and then 5 more buildings to make the curved wall on the back. So 23 separate buildings to make the walls of the fort. This is not to mention the 32 other buildings that make up the 32 guns all around the perimeter, each on a mu.ti-part fortress mounting. So this whole fort is 55 separate buildings all pushed together to make 1 whole.

 

[HaukeG]

Thanks for the explanation. That means that I really have several buildings for one actual sigle building.

Then I get it

Many greetings
Hauke

 

[Bullethead]

Thanks for the explanation. That means that I really have several buildings for one actual sigle building.

Correct.

It's also a good idea to use additional "buildings" for decorative items in and around the main "building". For example, stuff like ceiling fans, store shelves of merch, etc. This is because having such items in a separate "building" allows you to group-select them without also selecting any of the main "building". This makes it easy to duplicate the items if you need multiple examples if you want to recolor them all once you get them in place and decide they need it.

The same also goes for bushes in the flower beds around the main "building", because most of the flowers now are recolorable. It's a lot easier to multi-select all the bushes and recolor them simultaneously than it is to do them 1 at a time, which is what happens if each bush is a stand-alone scenery piece.

The way you set up these decorative "buildings" is to start with any gridded piece. If a collection of parts begins with a gridded piece, then the game calls it a "building" and you can use the building editor, which includes the ability to group- and multi-select the parts. So say with the bushes. Start a new "building" by placing some small gridded part ANYWHERE on the map. Far away is good because then you can't accidentally select and delete this part. I usually use the 1m gridded wood column because it's easy to hide under a bush or rock. Then just place the bushes where you really want them, and they're part of this bush "building".

Here's an example of decorative "buildings" inside a main "building".



In this pic, the walls, floor, and ceiling are a "building". Then there are 3 decorative "buildings": the desk with the 3 computers, the bigscreen TV, and the multiple ceiling fans. The little wooden columns for the decorative "buildings" are down in the basement of the main structural "building", out of sight and out of mind. Each of the decorative "buildings" was made off to the side in the open, saved as blueprints, then copied into the structure and placed as needed. The original ceiling fan blueprint only had 1 fan, but because it's a "building", I could group-select all the fan parts and copy them to make multiple fans.