The Level

Download the D3Edit files used in this lesson.
Lesson 10 The Bend Tool For this lesson you will need the completed level file from Lesson 9. Bending The Bend tool in D3Edit can be very powerful. It can also be very confusing (especially since there are no instructions!). It's actually quite simple once you learn a few basic rules. Open D3Edit and open up your level (thelevel.d3l)
ex. a	In this lesson we will construct a straight tunnel and make it turn 90 degrees. Actually we will do 2 tunnels - one bent left and one bent right - and connect them, making a full 180 degree turn. There is a slight difference in method depending on which way you bend your tunnel, that is why I want to do a bend in each direction. In ex. a you can see approximately how the tunnel will be placed. There are actually 2 rooms that make up this tunnel. Notice how the walls of the two rooms where the tunnel connects are even with each other? This will make placing our tunnel much easier.
In this lesson you will have some creativity as to the general shape of your tunnel. The length and number of segments, however, should match exactly with my example. We will begin by making the face that will be the entrance of our tunnel and extruding it. Both of the faces where our tunnel will connect are 40 units high...how convenient! Place some verts in the Front (XY) pane and make a face 40 units high, making sure that it isn't concave. This will be the mouth of the tunnel. Mine is shown in ex. b.	ex. b
Next, we want to extrude this face along the Z axis in 5 segments, each extrude being 40 units. My extruded tunnel is ex. c. Actually this example shows a lot of important information. You may wish to do some texturing at this point. Bend Principles The direction of our bend is shown by the red arrow in ex. c. The bend function will only affect verts that are marked. Note that the horizontal green reference line is lined up perfectly with the last bottom row of marked verts. This is the point at which our bend will begin. The faces and verts on and below this point will remain untouched ex. d. The green vertical reference line is where we want the bend to end. The reference frame (where the green lines intersect) is the radius point around which the tunnel will rotate. The tunnel will stay the same distance from this point for the duration of the bend. Our reference frame is 80 units from the nearest edge of the tunnel, therefore our bend will have a radius of 80 units. The red arrow points to the green vertical line at a point that is 80 grid units above the reference frame. This is where our bend will end (well, that's the plan anyway...). Use ctrl-click to set the reference frame exactly as shown in ex. c. Mark the top 5 rows of verts. Save your room now. We will use this file again - so name it straighttunnel.orf.	ex. c
Use the Bend button (ex. d inset) to open the Bend window. We want to bend around the Y axis. This is similar to the Lathe tool in that we need to determine the axis around which to rotate. The Distance for a normal bend is the length of the bendable part of your tunnel in units. For us we have 4 sections marked at 40 units each...440=160. Enter 160* in the Distance box. The distance can affect our bend in a lot of different ways - experiment with these numbers sometime. The angle is 90 degrees. Enter 90 in the appropriate box. When you think everything is cool, hit the Bend button. Your bend should resemble ex. d, depending on how you designed your initial face. You did it! And at least some of what we did made sense, right? Note how the reference frame is at the center of the bend. The bottom faces stayed straight, just as we planned.	ex. d
To complete our 180 degree turn, we will make a matching tunnel that is bent in the opposite direction. Don't get ahead of me though because there are a few things you need to know about bending in other directions.
Bend Over We will do this same bend over again a second time, only we will rotate right instead of left. Save this room again, but call it bend1.orf. We are going to use our straighttunnel.orf (or whatever you named it) to make the next bend. This way you don't need to re-place all those verts and extrude again. Now open straighttunnel.orf. Set the reference frame on the opposite side of the tunnel from the first bend that we did, and mark the proper verts as in ex. e. Open the Bend dialogue and select the Y axis again. We will be bending 90 degrees - fill it in. Now for the weird part - we need to set our distance to -160 (negative 160). You can leave it at regular 160 and try it if you like (just don't save - you need to reload straighttunnel.orf since there is no undo function). You will get a strange result from this. I'm not going to explain how the distance value relates to the bend direction, because I don't entirely know. Setting this at different values will produce some interesting results though.	ex. e
When you're all set, bend the tunnel. Ex. f was my result. Save this as bend2.orf. Attaching the Tunnels Open your bend1.orf, go to face mode, and mark all faces. Make current the face that will attach to your level (this would be the very first face you created with the verts). Now go directly to World View (use the Window menu...the last room opened before you enter World View will be the one that D3Edit thinks you want to attach). Make current the vertical face in the room shown in ex. g. Go to Room/Place Room at Current Room. The purple outline will be added to the center of this face, which is where we want it. Go to Room/Attach Room.	ex. f
ex. g	Notice now that the face you selected in the big room has been split up into smaller pieces? Zoom in and take a look. This is to keep the face from becoming concave. This is due to the weird angles of the mouth of your tunnel (depending on how you made it). Note that all the new faces are convex (opposite of concave). If you had one big face with a hole in the middle, it would be impossible for D3Edit to recognize properly. Ok so now our tunnel is half complete.
ex. h	ex. i
ex. j	Open room2.orf and mark all faces. This time we'll make current the face that will connect to our other tunnel end, rather than the big room it will attach to ex. h. Now go to World View and make current the face in ex. i. Use Room/Place Room at Current Room - the 2 tunnels should align perfectly with each other. If they don't, or if the other end of this newly placed room doesn't line up with the "reactor room", you've got a problem. If you used your own tunnel design, redo this lesson using the exact face that I started with to ensure that your face isn't too wide. If your tunnels look good. Room/Attach the room.
ex. k	Now only one step remains - we need to make a portal where the other end of this tunnel connects to the reactor room. This is another method of connecting rooms. In World View, make current the big face in the reactor room that the tunnel will connect to (outlined in red in ex. k). Go to Room and select Mark Room/Face. Now make current the tunnel face that will connect to the newly marked face. The result should look similar to ex. k.
Now go to Room and select Join Rooms. A dialogue will come up asking if you want to extrude to the center of the base face, or extrude straight out from the current face. We want the latter, so select No. Since our faces are lying flush with each other, there actually wont be any extruding seen. That's it! The big face in the reactor room was split into pieces just like the first one. Throw some textures in there and add a few lights...run Verify mine...should come up all zero's. Calculate the BOA and run the Radiosity, save as an .MN3, and away you go! The best way to master this function is through experimentation. Try different values in the Distance and Angle settings. Move the reference frame around. IMPORTANT! It is HIGHLY recommended that you read through the tutorial entitled Bend Function: Do the Math. This little gem explains how bad planning on a bend can make texture alignment impossible, due to the limited rotation increments of the texture aligning process. It's well worth the five minute read. Many thanks to Papacat for providing this insightful info.