Hammer Basics: Part 3 - Spawn Room and Displacement

Hello again, and welcome back to my Hammer Basics tutorials. Hopefully, since you're here, I haven't bored you out of your skull and you're, at least partially, enjoying yourself.

Today we're going to learn how to make a proper spawn room for TF2, how to use skyboxes, and displacement.
First, spawn rooms; if you're not mapping for TF2, ignore this section and go down to skyboxes.

I'm sure you know how spawn rooms are suppose to work, even if you don't know exactly what they do. Because of this, you know when someone hasn't made a spawn room correctly, and it's incredibly annoying.
Spawn rooms are made up of a few elements. The most important one is the brush-based entity func_respawnroom. Brush-based entities are things like triggers, or func_doors. Point based entities are the filter_activator_tfteam we used last time. The difference is that point-based entities are made with the entity tool (Shift-E) and brush-based entities are made from brushes using CTRL-T, or toEntity.
As I was saying, the func_respawnroom is the most important. It allows you to switch classes without dying, along with preventing engineers from building buildings in it.

So, let's make one. I'm assuming you've been following the tutorials up to this point, so you already have our basic room with a door.

Select the trigger texture (texture browser, 'trigger') and draw a trigger like so.

Hammer Basics: Part 2 - Functions and Triggers

Welcome back to my Hammer Basics tutorials. We left off last time having just made a simple room with a place for players to spawn. That's great and all, but we need to be able to do more advanced stuff. This tutorial is going to cover carving, triggers, doors, and team-based triggers.
So, let's get started.

First, we need to learn how to carve holes in walls. There is a carve tool that you can use, but I recommend never using it, unless you're dealing with two cubes, even then it's better to use the clipping tool (Shift-X.) The problem with the carve tool is that it can create microbrushes, really small brushes that can cut up your visleafs (don't worry about it) and make the map run slower. So, instead of the carve tool, I'm going to teach you how to use the clipping tool.
First, let's draw a cube in our wall where we want a door to be.

Now we need to select the wall that we're going to carve the hole in. At this point the cube we just made is just a guide so we can know where we need to draw the lines to cut into the wall.
Once the wall is selected, hit Shift-X. Now draw a line (in the 2D section) next to the cube we just made.
When you draw the line, one side of the wall will be red and one side will be white. Push Shift-X until both sides are white, that way it won't delete any of the brush, it'll just split it.

Hammer Basics: Part 1 - Rooms and Spawns

I like doing tutorials. I've done some video tutorials on Source's world editor Hammer. But they're in video format, which some people (myself included) don't prefer. So I figured that since I have a blog that I'm not using for much else at this point I might as well convert the tutorials over to text as well as video.
So, let's get started.

Open up Hammer through the Source SDK under Tools in Steam. You have to have at least one Source game, of course.
When Hammer opens, push CTRL-N and you'll see this.