Building Left 4 Dead Maps With Google Sketchup

notthatwillsmith writes "If you're a fan of Left 4 Dead and you've ever wanted to build a zombie-filled map of your hometown, office or grocery store, Maximum PC just posted a how-to that shows you how to convert photos of real-world locations into ready-to-play L4D 1 or 2 maps. It's everything you need to know in order to kill zombies with your friends — in the comfort of your own backyard."

Dismember the Alamo

[Hadlock]

This was how the creator of the map "dismember the alamo [l4dmods.com]" created his map of the alamo drafthouse (austin based movie theater chain) to scale. Hammer does a lot of things, but building real buildings to scale from photos is not one of them, which, presumably is why sketchup was supported as an importable filetype. If you can find the buildup thread on that site linked above, he does a pretty good tutorial (edit - you can find the sketchup/hammer buildup thread here [austinmodders.com]). I would imagine this is what the Maximum PC tutorial is based off of.
 
Also there's nothing wrong with building a map of your school for quake/doom/halflife; I did it too back in the quake 1 days. Schools are the right size for deathmatch maps (I tried building mine and my friends' houses but they're waaay too small unless you scale the rooms waaay up, schools with their cafeterias and gyms are about the right size) and I never thought about rampaging through the actual school. So chill out everyone.

Re:Can you save them to standard formats?

[jackbird]

within the bounds of the EULA, you can import the Sketchup models into Google Earth. Also, a number of 3D applications are adding .SKP read/write support. Outside the EULA, .SKP files are actually ZIP archives containing a Collada file of the 3D model, all the texture bitmaps, and some Sketchup-specific metadata files.