Im just touching up a piece of terrain and I want to get a piece of rock to slope into a flat brush.
trouble is - when you create a 3-sided brush in Radiant only 1 face is a triangle - i want 2 faces being triangles and a square base.
I’m sure this is a legal (non convex) geometrical shape - but I can’t make it!
Do you mean like pyramide?
You can use clipper tool to “carve” your existing brushes…
here is example of pyramid brush. copy paste it to
texteditor (notepad) and save as .map extension and load it up in radiant.
// entity 0
{
"classname" "worldspawn"
// brush 0
{
( 200 56 0 ) ( 96 56 0 ) ( 96 -32 0 ) radiant/notex 0 0 0 0.500000 0.500000 0 0 0
( 96 56 0 ) ( 144 56 72 ) ( 96 -32 0 ) radiant/notex 0 0 0 0.500000 0.500000 0 0 0
( 144 56 72 ) ( 200 56 0 ) ( 144 -32 72 ) radiant/notex 0 0 0 0.500000 0.500000 0
0 0
( 96 -32 0 ) ( 96 8 72 ) ( 200 -32 0 ) radiant/notex 0 0 0 0.500000 0.500000 0 0 0
( 96 8 72 ) ( 96 56 0 ) ( 200 8 72 ) radiant/notex 0 0 0 0.500000 0.500000 0 0 0
}
}
Ah just created the brush i was after - had to bend one of the points flat so that 1 disappeared and I’ve created the brush i was after
Here’s an image lol just to let you know:
editing verts like that can cause the whole brush to snap out of existence and corrupt your map, so I would recommend using the clipping tool to make that shape your after.
well i did that to get my inital block - then cut away what u see there - ive had those corruptions before - they are not nice
as a rule I would say its fine to edit verts as long as they dont vanish, so first back up our work.
although when dragging edges on complex multi faced brushes like boulders, some times an edge will disapear in my work.
I don`t know if that is as risky as single verts disapearing, but maybe the tools are more stable now, perhaps sock could confirm this or not?
If you do do the ‘lose a vertex thing’ be sure to run brush cleanup on it afterwards.
Won’t guarantee no problems, but should reduce the risk.
Undo won’t necessarily fix that. I’ve had that happen and undid it to have that brush all fux0red anyway… Saving and reloading is the best way to fix it from my experience.
good advice gerbil, and I always do snap to grid on any brushes I vertex edit.
as a rule I would say it
s fine to edit verts as long as they dont vanish, so first back up our work. Although when dragging edges on complex multi faced brushes like boulders, some times an edge will disapear in my work. I don`t know if that is as risky as single verts disapearing, but maybe the tools are more stable now, perhaps sock could confirm this or not?
Collapsing verts into each other on brushwork is a receipe for disaster and should be avoided at all costs. Even thou this can be done with patches/meshes for example and is a good method of creating different shapes, this is certainly not a good idea with brushwork. It can produce various errors in game: Broken faces, strange lighting, cracks, sparkly lines and strange compiler errors.
If you must use vertex editing on brushwork use the following guidelines:
Sock
:moo:
@sock, thanx for the info, but I`m not clear on the last two.
I`m not disagreeing with you, just trying to understand.
and when dragging vertices, which I tend to only do along grid lines with the other axis locked, like raising the corners of some trisouped brushes, I can`t imagine doing that with 3 point clipping.
so would you suggest then say clipping the bottom of the trisouped brushes? …that is an easy axial plane to clip along, and I assume it would have the same effect you describe as rebuilding the brush afterwards?
Any vertex drag can cause a face to be split into two triangles - even one that is a simple drag along a single axis - that disappears as you continue to drag, but leaves a duplicate plane. This is especially true for brushes that have multiple non-axial faces (e.g. brushes in irregular trisoups, such as those you might use to make a cave floor or ceiling).
Remember that the main reason that vertex editing (and to a lesser extent edge editing) is so dodgy is that brushes don’t actually have vertices - they’re really defined by a set of intersecting planes. So after you’re done the editor reinterprets the changes into plane terms, but sometimes it doesn’t do it right. Using the clipper tool as sock suggests reveals if there are problems. (As an aside - another thing that is great about the brush-shearing method used in sock’s quick rock-wall construction technique, is that it mainly manipulates the brush planes so it’s pretty safe)
The clipper tool should be first choice for complex manipulations on brushes that will have many non-axial faces, you can split and recombine brushes that you are making into complex shapes too which often makes things easier. Personally I try to avoid vertex editing where possible, and generally only use it for terrain and other trisoups.
- do you mean when editing the verts on any brush or just complex, multi faced ones? and what benefit does using a single tex during the editing have?
Its an old habit I use to make sure that all surfaces are setup with a non drawing shader. I also use it for alignment ideas as the caulk is so small and not clutters that you can easily see if textures aligned wrong or twisted. Plus face spliting can often create unwanted extra surfaces which can accidently slip through and get drawn. This is why we had the “caulk” button on the menu so we could quickly re-texture something for detail reasons.
- are you saying we should use the clipper instead of dragging edges?
so would you suggest then say clipping the bottom of the trisouped brushes? …that is an easy axial plane to clip along, and I assume it would have the same effect you describe as rebuilding the brush afterwards?
Yes it is an extremely quick way of regenerating the brushwork. Another trick is to go into vertex mode and press CTRL-G with a grid setting you want all the points to snap to.
Sock
:moo:
thanx for the info guys and it sounds like good advice to minimize the risk of our maps getting corrupted.
I always do snap to grid after vertex or edge dragging, while I have the brushes selected in vertice or edge dragging mode.
but I didn`t realize snap to grid forces the editor to rebuild the brushes afterwards, which does sound easier an quicker for me, then dragging down the bottom brush faces and clipping them in my terrain, and yet this would have the same brush rebuilding effect yes? 
and I`ve found that caulk button on the toolbar is very handy, especially when clipping brushes seems to not always paste the clipped faces with caulk.
in prefs I have the option “vertex editing splits faces” turned off, what exactly does that do and should I have it turned on?
when we clone a brush, does that rebuild the new brush or will it copy any hidden, lost faces and other problems of the original brush?
ratty, my experience in cloning brushes is quite painless but it happened once or twice that a defect passed on to the next generation but that rarely happens.
I don’t know what I would do if cloning was b0rked :o
but I didn`t realize snap to grid forces the editor to rebuild the brushes afterwards, which does sound easier an quicker for me, then dragging down the bottom brush faces and clipping them in my terrain, and yet this would have the same brush rebuilding effect yes?
Sorry but I did not explain myself right. The CTRL-G thing does not rebuild the brush but simply pushes all vertex points to the grid. Often people forget it exists and only use it for meshes/patches. I found it extremely useful when I was editing terrains.
Sock
:moo:
@MadJack, understood and Im not aware of it happening to me yet, but in the past I knew less about what went on "under the hood" of radiant, so its good to know where bugs can happen if we don`t take precautions.
@sock, thanx for clarifying, so really the safest way to map is to use both the clipping, automatic rebuild method, and snap to grid, yes?
