B. Vertex Manipulation

This is the brush I created in section A

Where I used vertex manipulation in my street lamp was in two spots. One time I used it on the base block for the light pole. See how my cube has slanted sides? I moved all of the vertices of the top of the cube in some. The second place I used it was the slanted part of the extending pole with the light on it. I could have actually done the same thing with the skew tool, but I'm lazy :), and you can get the same result by moving the vertices yourself.

How do you do it?  Well it should make a lot more sense to you once you move some yourself. So here is how it is done:

This needs some zoomage, wouldn't you say?

In one of the 2D views, zoom in close enough to where you can see what you are doing.

Ahh, Better

As you should always do, make sure you are in the proper grid size to do what you want to, in this case you want your vertices to be common to points on the grid, and have reasonable increments for moving.  The shot above shows some points of the brush not common to grid points...

Always be sure you are on a proper gridsize for the increments of moving whatever you are working with

Now that you are properly set, select the red brush by clicking on a line (clicking on vertices will not select it). When its selected (goes from dark to bright red) you can click on a vertex. Click the one you want to move, and it should be selected.

Select the red brush, then click a vertex

When your vertex is selected it should have what looks like a + on it.

Moving the vertex

To move it, you have to hold down the ALT button while dragging it. Pretty simple really.

With the vertex selected, hold down ALT and drag it on the grid

So move all the vertices of your brush that you want, and remember you have to check all different views (side, top, front), as 1 2D view can't tell the whole story.

So there, that is vertex manipulation. It is easy for the most part and I love to use it. The only problem is that it is buggy.

Problems:

Certain shapes you create it will not like. Take my example:

Whacked out Brush

Look at the shape I created by moving the vertices of this cube. As simply as I can explain it, is don't create a polygon that would actually have to "fold" itself to exist properly. Like the polygon on the right side of this cube. It would actually have to fold itself into multiple polygons to exist properly. So, when you add this brush into the world, it of course turns out very jacked up.

Zany effects of the corrupted brush

In the case of this brush, the textures on the oddly shaped walls do not scale properly, as will happen on erroneous polygons. For polygons that are just completely jacked up however, like the one on the right, it can dissapear alltogether, as well as scale improperly, doing different weird things depending on what angle it is being viewed at. So, to sum that up, be careful what shapes you are creating when you move vertices of a brush.

One final note, as I mentioned before, this feature sometimes doesn't want to work. The problem I have is that sometimes I will want to move just a vertex, but the editor wants to move BOTH vertices of the adjoining line. This pisses me off, however there is possibly a keyboard command that I am unknowingly hitting and just don't know how to switch on purpose. Knowing UnrealED tho, it is probably just a bug.

Vertex manipulation is neat, but you also need to know about brush intersection/deintersections...

Next section: Brush Intersection/Deintersection >

This tutorial contains the following sections