Introduction: Part 2

Now that you have Hammer open, you have taken your first step towards making your first map.

Due to the recent OrangeCrap update some of the dialog boxes pictured in this tutorial have changed slightly. But the contents are still the same and you should be able to figure out what is what.

Click on "file". See the drop-down menu? Before we click on "new", take notice of the shortcut to the right. It says CTRL N. It's important to take note of the shortcuts because they make things go a lot faster. Now click "new".

You should have seen 4 black viewports pop-up, as well as all your tools. They are now highlighted, and clickable.

To the right of the viewports, there are a bunch of boxes with writings in them. One says "select:" another says "VisGroups:" another one says "Move Selected:" and the last says "Textured Group:" These are all things That you learn about as we go along. The first thing you learn about them, is that they are movable. So let us move them out of the way. Just click on them near their titles, and drag them to the right. Put them all in one column. Put them in this order for now from top to bottom. "Move Selected:" on the top. "Textured Group:" under that, next "select:" and last "VisGroups:". Don't worry if you can't see the whole "VisGroups:" dialogbox. It's not important at this time.



Moving those boxes should have given you some room to work with. Now you need to learn some vocabulary. If you hover your mouse over a tool icon, a little window will pop-up telling you the name of the tool. Take a look at the picture I created. Learn the names of these tools. It will make your life, and my life a lot easier. Although I show you the shortcuts to the right of the name, it is not necessary to memorize the shortcuts at this time. I will tell you which shortcuts are important, and which shortcuts you should remember. (Note: I know the funny symbol that looks like a Rubik's Cube says the name of it is, "Toggle Texture Application". But we are just going to call that the, "Texture Tool".)

Okay, This is the first shortcut that you should learn. "Crtl-A" go ahead and press that. It centers your four viewports. You can also click, "view\autosize 4 views", from the view drop-down menu. That's where the shortcuts come in handy, for all the stuff in the drop-down menu's.
Now we will take a look at the 4 viewports. 3 of the viewports have a grid in them and one is solid black. The solid black viewport is the 3-D viewport. In this viewport you'll see the world you create in three dimensions. The 3-D viewport will help you visualize the final look of your map. You want to make sure you set the view in this viewport, to "3-D shaded textured polygons". To do this, click on the word "camera" in the solid black viewport. And in the drop-down menu, select "3-D shaded textured polygons". This enables you to see your textures, as you apply them. The other viewports with the grids in them, are your 2-D viewports. They consist of your TopView, FrontView, and the SideView. you do not need to do anything to these viewports. As the expert mapper, you are, you will be working in all four viewports.



Now, see the little tic-tac-toe symbols near the top of Hammer, under "File", "Edit", "Map"? The only ones we need to worry about, are the ones with the little light blue "-" and "+" sign on them. These control the size of your grid in the 2-D viewports. Changing the size of your grid will help you line things up in your map. I like to work with a smaller grid, so right off the bat I like to click on the tic-tac-toe symbol with the little blue "-", sign about six times.

NEXT: GoTo Lesson 1