Fundamentals of Mapping

This guide aims to help you begin mapping as a complete beginner. It will start out by helping you first finding your tools and getting the bare minimum knowledge to use them

Finding Hammer

Make sure you can comfortably navigate to your .../steamapps/common/GarrysMod folder, and familiarize yourself with the folders therein.
All filepaths mentioned on this page are relative to this folder.

To find Hammer, navigate within your /bin folder and search for hammer.exe. Opening this executable should result in a window that looks like...

This is Hammer, and the tool you will be using to build your maps.

Using Hammer

Before we start doing anything lets review the layout design of Hammer.

Above is the same image as the previous section but with the different areas of hammer highlighted.

Red

This is your working area. When we create or open a map, this area will fill with 4 main views, 3D View, Top-down, Left, Right. You'll become accustomed to working with these views as your experience grows but its good practice to use the 3D view to examine your map, and the other flat views to build and align blocks as your construct them.

Yellow

These are your tools. These are Unpopulated right now because we don't have a map open. To keep it simple we wont cover every tool here but its important to know that your most common tools will be along this side.

Green

This is the console. This will be hidden whenever we open up a map but it can provide useful information as to what search-paths hammer is using.

Light Blue

Along the right side is your tool options. This Consists of your Material Selector, Vis-Groups Tree, Tool Properties, and Selection Mode Settings. Don't worry if yours are in a different order, grabbing the top of the boxes can allow you to shuffle these around and even un-dock them to fit your workflow.

Darker Blue

The area along the top are buttons that represent different editing options, Quicker shortcuts to access different options. This allows you to toggle different ways of editing more quickly.

Purple

These are drop-down menus allowing access to more uncomplex functions, For example we can use the file button here to create a new map.