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What I want to talk about in this section is the 'Properties' tab for a regular brush, and how those properties influence the framerate and aspect of a map:d. Subdivide We'll be spending quite some time talking about this one ... Usualy, when you have two brushes intersecting like this, the processor will split the brushes using the planes of one of them to split the other one. Worst case scenario? More than 4 brushes instead of two:
Most of the info for each property can be obtained by simply clicking the name of the property. That's why I won't talk about properties like 'solid' or 'translucent'. However, we'll be talking about 'lightmap', 'subdivide', 'invisible' and 'nonexistant'. a. Invisible Turning this true will make your brush invisible. It'll still be in your level; if they're solid, you can still bump into them, although you won't see it. While invisible, it doesn't matter the texture applied. b. Nonexistant A nonexistant brush 'lives' only in DEdit. It won't appear in your level. Useful mainly as a ruler. c. Lightmap One of the best way to shade a brush is through LightMapping. You'll get the most natural-looking shaddows ever. However, this will also increase the poly count (see modmakers tutorial and the docs that came with the tools).You'll probably say: "So fucking what?". Well! How many faces (polies) has a cubic brush? 6 you say? OK! Now two brushes that don't intersect, each having 6 polies gives us 12 polies. Two brushes that intersect (that is at least 4 brushes!) will give us 24 polies. Ouch! The poly count just doubled! That's the reason why all tutorials state repeatedly 'have your brushes touch neatly, but do not intersect them'. However, you might need a structure that has intesecting brushes. What to do? For start, we'll turn the 'Subdivide' flag to "FALSE" on the intersecting brushes: To make sure that we won't split our brushes, when processing, we'll clear the 'Fix T-junctions' checkbox: Now we can intersect those brushes in any way we like. We'll still have only 12 polies.
