Legacy:Brush Hacking

Filthy brush hacking techniques

A quote from Brush...

...you can do some pretty interesting things by manually editing what has been copied to the clipboard. If you, for instance, give two brushes the same model reference, vertex editing one instance of that brush will automagically vertex-edit all other instances as well (and real-time). Since I guess that unused model objects won't be saved along with the map, I suppose that can indeed serve to save some file space (not too much though since the rendered, cut world polygons are stored separately) and probably even as a comfortable editing tool. —Mychaeel

Tarquin: I have just successfully edited a brush in Textpad. I've removed the two cap surfaces of a quarter-torus to make a bendy sheet tube! wahey!

Pasting back to Ued takes an age, be patient.

It's also possible to change the class of the brush actor, and get a CSG entity of another class. I've tried this with a subclass of Brush and the geometry build treats it like a normal brush. I have no idea if this would work with other classes, and I have no idea if this might actually be useful for something.

ReCasting Movers

Situation: you have a mover all made and set up nicely, keyframes and all, but you now find it should be a different Mover class. Do this:

1. copy it
2. paste to a text editor (eg TextPad)
3. change the class there
4. subtract 32.0 from Location X,Y,Z (because when pasting back into the map, UnrealEd moves it by that amount. This counters that effect)
5. select all the text and copy it
6. paste in UnrealEd

The Model info in Brushes

Tarquin: Weirdness: I've copied the same mover object twice. the only difference was that I moved it away from the origin and the 2nd time there is no Model information in Textpad