.Map :: MoHAA Mapping

Hey...

this'll sound stupid to the people who are mean v.v...

but I know everyone here didn't know everything when they first started mapping... so here I go...

What is the difference between No Draw and Caulk...

I know your supposed to use Caulk if the player isn't supposed to see it... (the bottom of a building...)

but when I was studying the railings on V2 Rocket Facility and Stalingrad I noticed the No Draw and how you are supposed to No Draw on windows...

When I think caulk I usally think "it wont draw a texture"... well is no draw the same concept???? What is the difference?

it's more of an aesthetic differece, they do the same thing, but caulk is conventionally used for structural brushes like warehouses and such, and nodraw for water and windows.

it's just mapper convention.

Nodraw is for brushes with see-through textures and it can not be used on a brush that has more than one texture, or you get an error. Caulk is used to increase game preformance by removing the need to draw brush faces that players will never see.

^ what they said.

In addition the main difference between the two: caulk is solid and nodraw is nonsolid. So in theory you can use both textures on the faces the player cannot see so long as those faces are not in contact with the void. Meaning you can't use nodraw to plug holes and seal your map, so in those cases it must be caulk.
(Make two brushes next to each other and let them sink into the floor a little. Texture one with caulk and one with nodraw. You'll see that the caulked brush will carve a hole in the floor and will block you. The nodraw brush will be completely ignored as if it's not there.)
The reason they used nodraw on those railings is because those particular textures have 'cull none' in their shader and that means that both sides of the faces will be visible. If they would have used caulk there they would have gotten a (negligible) compile error.

So in some cases you can use both but this is how they were intented:
caulk > map sealing and needless faces
nodraw > in combination with 'cull none'- textures

thanks! you all answered it!