I've always been intrested in mapping. I've drawen more layouts than I can count inches around the world, and I'm itching to get some down to 3d. The only problem is that I can only do brushwork, which is (I believe?) a majority of the mapping process, I dont understand yet how to do entitys, lighting, actually anything besides brushwork!

Where did you guys learn to map?

umm... I started to map for HL about '99 for TFC and then did some mappin' for CS, before it went retail (it was so much better back then).

I recently start back up, due to NS inspiring me. Most of what i learned I learned from tutorials and playing around, and if i couldn't make it work, i hung out at vlatitude.com ( i think i still have an account there, lol)

Of course i never released any work from those days, it was more of seeing what i could do. I constantly ran into Mappers-block a lot (currently there now on my new map). But at least i released 2 (if you can call it 2) maps for NS.

After all that trial and error, i try to help newcommers, like yourself. So if you need something, or can think of it, but can't get hammer to do it... ask in this forum (usually a new post per problem).

Happy mapping.

Thanks, could you post the sites or where you got the tutorials from?

Hmm...I just experimented with the brushes and looked at The Whole Half-Life for help along the way...you can't be stupid and map at the same time...

http://cariad.co.za/twhl/tutorialbrowse.php?tuttype=1

It'll take you a day or two to get the hang of it...and about a month to really know what to do.

Just screwin' with hammer, trying to get it to do stuff. Looking at other NS maps inspired me and I felt compelled to make NS maps. Whenever I just couldn't get something to work the way I wanted it to, I'd find a random tutorial somewhere. Just play around with it, best way.

I'm still learning but this seems to be a really good site

I started off mapping for probably the easiest game in the world, Duke Nukem 3D. Brushwork was essentially 2D textures which were walls, it was like a drag and drop DOS editor. I don't remember much as I was extremely young at the time.

For Half-Life I started on WC3.3, and could never get my head round any of the tutorials I saw, after I did "learn how to map" I found that most if not all tutorials I had read on beginning to map took the long, difficult and worst ways.

I just started putting blocks (brushes) together, trying to align the textures (which at first was very fiddly) then I looked up how to create lighting, what an entity was, the types (brush + point) then compiling. After I had compiled a small blocky DM map I went on to see some simple tutorials on how to shape things, vertexing and clip. By this time I had learned the essentials to mapping, over the past 6-8 months I've learn't about rotations, flipping, skies, what makes a map, what the entities do, how some things are created etc.

The best way I find is to fiddle around in an editor, its helping me with Radiant. Although Radiant has some bloody brilliant tutorials which are easy to follow, unlike the native HL editor.

Actually I am a noob too (almost done with my first map ns_postpile)

however if you are a turtorial **** like me you can fine 99% of what you will need to do from these sites (in order by importance to NS IMO):

http://nsworld.ns-central.co.uk/mappinggui...appingGuide.php

http://www.slackiller.com/tommy14/cs_maplinks.htm

http://cariad.co.za/twhl/tutorialbrowse.ph...ype=1&subtype=1

http://snarkpit.com/editing.php?page=tutor...HL&type=scenery

http://www.planethalflife.com/hlsdk2/sdk/MS3d_to_HL.htm

Good luck... Read the forums it will help quite a bit!

mapping for a long time now

doom1 and 2 (deu2 map editor)
Duke Nukem 3d (build 3d)
HL mapping since 1998-ish (worldcraft and now hammer)
Unreal, Quake meh even some 2d mapping thingies for dungeon keeper 2 and starcraft type games...

tutorials? hmm lets see now, meh Avitar already put down one of the best and my personal favourat...

http://cariad.co.za/twhl/tutorialbrowse.php?tuttype=1

it has all the basic mapping tuts you need to start your basic architechture, lighting and how to use entities etc...

Just messing with Hammer, if I say I learned everything by myself, I mean it.
But yeah, I have a mappers-block all the time.. so. :\

I learned to map here, on these forums.

After going through the Wavelength tutorials (I can't find a link for these, sorry), I basically learned everything I now know just by mapping and trial and error. Of course, these forums and The Collective have proved invalulable for picking up bits of information and so on.