Hello and welcome to my "Basic Custom Brush" Tutorial
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Updates:
In this tutorial I will make updates if needed. These updates will be seperated by dotted lines like the ones at the beggining of this tutorial and will be entirely in bold. The person who provided the inormation in the update will receive credit in the update.
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What to expect from this tutorial:
If you are an experienced user of UED then you will more than likely know everything in this tutorial already. I am aiming this tutorial at the less experienced mappers but not total beginners. This is "not" a tutorial created for a major in depth description on the process but simply to get the user to grips with the idea of custom brushes. Although I am making this a simple tutorial I am assuming you will have a basic knowledge of UED i.e. What the Red Builder Brush is.
I will not be explaining how to texture the brush we create nor will I be telling you how to create different shapes. If you do not already know how to do these things then i reccomend reading a few beginner tutorials.
I will be showing the process of making a single custom brush and how to export this brush for future use.
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Quick Word:
Making custom brushes for your map can really help improve the visual aspect of your work. It enables you to make and export complex peices of architecture which saves a considerable amount of time if you plan on using any peices of architecture many times during a map or if you intend to use that brush in other maps you are going to create.
However, complex custom brushes can create a high node count in your map, since "more nodes = more processing power" it can drastically effect the lower end PC users so its a good idea not to over use them in any single area.
There are ways to lower the node count and the main one would be to use the semi-solid brushes for the majority of the architeture that players are not going to be touching. There are errors that can occur whilst using semi solid brushes so it is not a good idea to make an entire room out of them. Also if you zone your map properly it should also majorly cut down on the amount of processing needed and speed up your map.
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A simple description of a custom brush:
A number of seperate and differently shaped brushes placed together to create a new shaped brush.
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The Process
First Step
The first step in this process will be to create a seperate area away from your main map. This area should be used for any custom brushes you want to make, keeping them in this seperate area gives you the space to intersect the red builder brush. But you don't need to know about that yet.
Start off by creating a 2048x2048x2048 cube away from you map with your cube builder, lighting here is not essential but you can do so if you want and the same with the texturing. Since this cube and its content get deleted at the end of the map design process its appearence is not important. I tend to use one of the block colours you see when you first open up the textures window. For this one I will be using the green block texture.
Second Step
Now that we have a nice seperate area to work in lets get making the custom brush. I am not going to create a complex brush, but while making this simple brush you will get to understand how this process works. It is always best to have an idea of what you want before you start creating, knowing what you want speeds up the process and you usually get something much more impressive for your efforts. The brush that is going to be created in this tutorial is just going to be some shapes thrown together, so if it any point during this tutorial you wonder what the finished brush could be used for.nothing, nothing at all so feel free to create something else while trying this out.
As you will see in the image below I have created a shape out of a 2 cylinders and 2 cubes. The main problem at the moment is that they are all seperate brushes and having to select 4 seperate brushes each time you want move or copy a peice of architecture can be very time consuming and just plain annoying after a while (well it was for me before i discovered how to do this) . What we plan on doing is making all those sepearate shapes into a single shape by using our Red Building Brush.
What we need to do first is make sure that our red building brush is big enough to totally incase our shapes so that they are all sitting comfortably within the red bulding brush. So if you new shape is 256 units in height, width and depth you need to make your brush at least 257 units in height, width and depth. I usually add at least 10-20 units on all sizes.
Third Step
Ok, we have our shapes totally sorrounded and ready to be combined. Do this by pressing the intersect button and if you dont know which button that is look at image 1 below. Once you press that you will see that your red building brush has wrapped itself round your shapes taking on their shape. What your red building brush has done here is not only take on the shape but has also taken the textures you used aswell. See image 2 below.
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"An additional step can be taken to lower the node count of this new brush and is recommended. By changing just a few brushes on the shape I created, NuLL has lowered the node count of the intersected brush by almost half. Look at the image he provided below and compare the final intersected brush with the one I made and you can see it is alot tidier. (Click on the thumbnail to get a larger view)
He was also kind enough to create a node ratio so I thought I would include that aswell.
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Original
84 Nodes
2.05:1 Ratio
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Semi's
47 Nodes
1.20:1 Ratio
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Doing this is a very good idea but if your new to mapping don't worry about it to much for now, however it will be something that you will need to learn about in the future."
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You can now go round your map and use that brush as many times as you want. Of course we have a problem now, what happens when we want to use that brush again later? how do we get it back without having to go through that process again? How can we use something we made in one map in another map? Let me tell you.
Now that we have the shape we want in 1 solid brush rather than 4 seperate shapes we want to keep it this way. This is where exporting comes in handy, we take the shape of the brush as it is now and we export it out of UED and into our Maps folder. I have included images below to show you how to export the brush. And when ever you feel like using that brush again you just need to import it from your Maps folder back into UED. It's as simple as that. I would like to point out that you should not "save" your brushes, im not sure why but saving brushes just doesn't work.
Anyway hope this quick tutorial has helped out some people.
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