1. Creating Interesting Geometry
2. The Vertex Tool

Now you have mastered basic brush resizing and duplication, we will move on to more advanced brush manipulation. Open up our example firstmap again.

Brush Manipulations and Distorsions

As we have learned earlier, we must select a brush before we can move it or resize it. When a brush is selected, the borders of the brush turns red in the 2D views. In addition, small white handles appear along the borders. We already know that we can resize the brush by dragging these handles, but we can do much more than that.

If you have been paying close attention, you should already know that if we click on a brush that is already selected, the white square handles become small circular handles on the corners of the brush. If you drag these circular handles, you rotate the brush instead of changing its size. By default, the brush rotation is constrained at 15 degree intervals. If you want to rotate a brush freely, hold down Shift while you drag the circular handles.



With the brush selected in rotation mode, you can click on the brush one more time. This time, the white handles will appear along the mid-section of each brush edge in the 2D views. And if you drag these handles, you can distort a brush by shearing it.



Finally, if you click on the brush again when it's in the shearing mode, the handles return to the original resizing mode.

Making a Staircase

Now, let's try this out on a real example. We'll make a brick staircase by shearing the brush.

First, create a 16x128x64 (width x length x height) brush with the texture "de_dust/residbwall02" against the North wall of the map. Then, select the brush and change the editing mode to shearing by clicking on the brush two more times (not a double-click). Then, from the y/z 2D view, drag the edge of the brush down and distort it like so:



Duplicate this brush to make the other stair rail, keeping a width of 96 units between them. We will add a prop_static model of "models/props/de_dust/door01a.mdl" between them (this model is found in the folder models/props/de_dust). The final product should look like this:



Gorgeous hey!