Knowledge of basic use of D3 Edit, this Tutorial assumes that you have been successful in making some simple rooms, including use of extrude. If not, please read "The Level", a tutorial by Schplurg. Find it at Game Edit Tutorials
Also recommended: "Creating Rock Formations, Concavity tutorial, Understanding normals, Add/Removing face vertices, Finding and Fixing T-Joints, Finding and Fixing Bad Shells" and other tutorials by Hydra. (Also at Game Edit Tutorials.) "Just Say No To Bending", by Papacat also has some great info that you may find useful for this tut.
Tools: Latest Version of D3 Edit by Atan.
First, you will need to make a Room. The first face you make should be the size of the entry portal.
The largest D3 ship, the Phoenix, has a radius of 8.018578, so your face needs to be more than double that. (20 is a good minimum)
The more verts you use, the more faces you'll get, and the more detailed the walls will be. Notice in the pic, I've created an octagon, but added an extra vert to each side. Use fairly short extrudes, for the same reason. (30 shown)
Another option... my favorite... is to select the face, in an existing room, that will become the portal. Then, in World View, hit the insert button, and presto, you have a new room! Just be careful not to distort the portal in any way.
The tut's (at least the ones I've read) instruct you to mark a face, flip the normal, then extrude. I skip the mark and flip routine by using a negative number in the extrude dialog. If you are extruding from the first face of a new room, use a positive number, uncheck delete base face. Second extrude, enter a negative number, select point outward for the face normals (for an internal room... the negative number reverses them) and check the delete base face option. Subsequent extrudes, select a face, then hit ctrl+e, to extrude the same amount.
Note the face marked (blue outline) in the pic above. We want to move the entire face without distorting it. Hit the green "key" button and scroll down to 'Modify items' and try the different ways listed to move your marked face. (You did save the room first... eh?) Note that up and down is relative to the window your in, and won't work in 3D view.
A couple of points not readily apparent from "key": The verts or the faces can be marked, and moved, depending on which mode you are in. Verts and faces are not objects, so "objects rotate" doesn't work on them. "Twist" will rotate marked around the intersection of the green reference lines. Move them with ctrl + lclick. Use all four panes to see the effect of what you are doing.
In the pic below, I've twisted slightly in the front view. Now my two octagonal faces are offset and rotated slightly. Don't worry about non-planer faces for now, except for the face you will be extruding from. Use the expand and contract buttons to change the size of the face.
Look at the marked verts in top and side view at below, they are all on the same grid. If not, move them in line to make this face planer again so you can extrude from it. This face should also not be concave. If you can draw a line between any two verts on this face, and that line lies outside the perimeter of the face, you have a concave face. Fix it by moving verts in the front view, in this example
Looking at the pic below, you can see that I've changed the angle and size of the face, extruded -30 and repeated a number of times. Then I marked the verts of the final extrude face and snapped them to the same gridline, in side view.
Now I have a couple of errors, that final face is concave, due to snapping it to the grid. (white arrow in 3D view.) Easy fix, I'll just move some verts, in front view, until it is good.
The white arrows in the top and side view are pointing to a blue cross hair. This is the room center, and D3 will use it for calculating sound transmission, missile lock, and AI movement, among other things, who the heck knows what. It is vital that the room center be inside the room. Its location is calculated as the center of all the verts of the room.
We could fix this by grabbing a handful of verts, and moving them to the left in the side view. You would have to also move some down in the top view. And you would have to move them more than you think, as the room center would move a bit also.
Another method would be to insert a sub object into the room, in a place where its verts would pull the room center back into the room. I'll go into more detail about doing that in another tutorial. For now, we will accept that this room has an error.
We do have some more work to do on this room, though. If you flew this room, you would see clearly that it is a series of octagons. And although they are in random places, they are still visible as octagons, and thereby spoiling the effect of a natural cave.
The next step will remedy that.
Simply grab one or more verts, mark'em, move'em about, this way and that, use all three 2d views. Unmark'em. Repeat... You get the idea!
Now we have a nice looking cave, but we also have some problems...
First, most of the faces are non-planer. There are a couple of ways to fix that.
The quickest and easiest way would be to mark all the faces, then split then with the 'Face Planer Check' button.
Another way would be to extrude them with 'Needle' on in the extrude toolbox. Needle will give you many more faces to play with. If your tunnel has the room, you can pull the new vert (that needle places) up or down to form stalegmatights... uh, stalegetamights... uh, you know, those pointy things in caves...;) The disadvantage with this method is that you must extrude one face at a time. In a larger room it might be worth the trouble for the extra detail.
Well, it is pretty clear that the room center is not inside the room in the pic above.
If you're sure that the roomcenter is inside the room, but verify says not, first update to the latest version of edit. Older versions reported room center not in room erroneously when working in a room file. Do you still get the message? With this style room, it's very hard to tell from looking at the 2D views whether it really is or not.
Here's a way you can see where the roomcenter is in a 3D view. Import the room into a new level. As the first room in a level, the player0 start will be at the room center. You can go to current room view and clearly see in 3D view if the player start is not in the room.
You should be able to draw a line between each portal, without leaving the room. At each portal there is a bnode. These bnodes guide the AI from portal to portal. The AI will try to go from portal to portal. Due to the 'U' shape, it can't in this room. The bots may have some leeway in this regard, as they wander a bit when they get stuck.
We have all seen Guidebot get stuck at a wall, vainly trying to go through the wall while trying to guide you to your goal. Homing weapons have a bit tougher life, as they suicide on the same wall, with your opponent just around the corner in the next room.
Texuring the cave tunnel is pretty easy, mark all the faces by hitting 'M' and then you can apply a rock texture to all the faces at once. Or, if you have added sub-objects, you can, in face mode and in the 3D veiw-port, hit the '0' on your num-pad. This will only mark faces that are connected to the current one. In the alignment dialog, select 'Maked face(s)' and hit 'Default UVs'.
Since this room is a jumble of rock, not aligning the textures to each other is more realistic.
It would be easiest to just light this room with ambient lighting, but that won't be the most realistic. Some other options for lighting would be crystals growing from the rocks, pools of lava, lamps, and of course combinations.
Creating pools of lava is pretty easy. Just pull some verts down, make the face on the bottom of the cave a little lower and change the textures to lava. Lava is pretty bright, so it doesn't take much, and it is something you would expect in a cave. Or at least in a Descent cave, anyway.;)
Creating and installing lamps and crystals and such would be best left for another tut, me thinks!
Going from well lit areas to dark areas can be very scary!
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