Making Your First Room in Valve Hammer Editor

If you want to start mapping for Half-Life 1, see my first guide about setting up Valve Hammer Editor (HL1 map editor)

First of all, start Valve Hammer Editor if you don’t have it open.

Step 1 - Start a new map. Go to menu “File” then press “New”. If you have multiple game configurations select the one you want and then press “OK”

You will see something like this after.

Step 2 – Lets start by making the room floor. To do that, click “Block” tool [Red Circle] (This tool allows you to make primitives), then just click at yellow circle spot (or somewhere else) and drag it to yellow circle spot (or somewhere else ), that will make a block.

When you satisfied with position and size of the floor, press Enter or right-click the block and select “Create Object”

Step 3 – Now lets look the preview of our floor. To move camera, put your mouse over “camera” window and rotate your camera. (Use Arrow keys to rotate, W to move forward, S to move backwards, A to move left and D to move right).

If you notice you’ll probably see a weird texture. So, lets change the texture.

Don’t mind the red, blue and green lines. They just indicate X Y Z and origin point of the map.

Step 4 - To change a primitive texture we must select it. To select a block just click it on 2D or 3D view.

After you selected, you must choose the texture. Click on “Browse” button [Red Circle] from texture window.

Step 5 - You’ll notice a lot of textures. You probably now wondering how will I find the texture I want in all these?.

Fortunately for us, Valve named most of the textures according to the use they have. If you notice at bottom, you’ll have a box named “Filter”. In that box you put the keyword of the texture you looking for.

Here’s a list of some keywords:

• wall - Wall textures
• flr / floor - Floor textures (flr contains most of the floors for Half-life 1, but some mods use floor keyword)
• wood - Wood textures
• dr / door - Door textures (dr contains most of the doors)
• fifties - Inside / Office textures

You probably right now, want a floor texture, so just put flr or floor into filter, and select the texture you want.

Step 6 – To apply texture to a selected block just press “Apply Texture” button [Red Circle]. and voila! The block is textured!

Step 7 – We have to make walls! They use the same basic as floor, but we’ll be using all 2D views now.

Before creating a block we can specify the texture we want when block is created. So, just select a wall texture.

Now, lets create top wall. Select “Block” tool and drag mouse from green point to yellow point.

Step 8 - You probably noticed that the block is at the same weight as the floor, so, lets raise the wall.

To do that, on side view, select the middle top box [from Green position] and drag it above [to Yellow position].

After you done that, just press “Enter” or Create object.

Step 9 - Only 3 walls left! But it could be boring making every wall out of a new block. Let’s duplicate the existing wall instead.

Duplicating is quite easy. On 2D Top view select the top wall by pressing the X in the middle of the wall [Red Circle]. Then while holding your SHIFT drag it to the bottom [Green Circle].

You’ll have top and bottom walls now.

Step 10 – Left and Right walls left, but if you duplicate top or bottom wall they wont fit in the left and right wall. So, lets duplicate and re-size.

To re-size something use the 8 little boxes around the selected object to size it.

Duplicate a wall, and then re-size it to fit left wall. After you done that, just duplicate left wall and drag it to right wall position.

Step 11 – We’ve done floor and walls, now we must close the room by making a ceiling.

On 2D Front or Side, select the floor X and duplicate it to ceiling position.

You probably want to change texture. The keyword for ceiling textures is: ceil, tough many floor textures can also be used to ceils. You’re DONE!

Link to Next Tutorial: Half Life: Adding Player Spawn and Testing Your Map.

Keep tuned for more tutorials