Preferences
Texture brushes in 2D
This shows the textures on brushes in the 2D window, useful for building geometry from a 2D image.
Farplane
The maximum farplane distance (controls how far the in editor cubic clipping can go).
Vehicle Arrow Time
A chain of vehicle nodes draws a spline in editor when set up correctly. This control sets how far apart the arrows are by time the vehicle would take to get from one arrow to the next.
Drop Height
Ctrl-Alt-left click copies a currently selected entity to the location clicked. Ctrl-Alt-middle click moves the selected entity. Drop height controls how far above or below the surface you clicked on the entity will be placed. Useful for making the base of trees be below the terrain when they are placed on non flat surfaces.
Scale base
See Toggle "tree/grass placement mode". Scale base defines the default model scale for this mode (100 = normal).
Scale Range
Like scale base, but controls the amount of scale variation.
Tolerant weld
The distance at which the editor will do tolerant welding.
Splay distance
Select some vertices in a terrain patch and press Alt-W. This will make these vertices separate apart along their current direction by the distance set in this box. Useful for keeping the texture a consistent scale on a patch which uses Set for its texturing (for example roads).
View/Show
Show Smart Tube Nodes (Ctrl-Alt-9)
This actually toggles showing all the node types other than pathnodes
Show AI Nodes (Alt-9)
This toggles showing pathnodes.
Selection
Select Connected (Ctrl-Alt-E)
Selects all the entities targeted by an entity and all the entities which target an entity. Useful for selecting vehicle node chains and friendly chains.
Connect Entities (Ctrl-K)
When doing a lot of terrain work or linking a lot of entities you may want to rebind this in your ini file.
Hide Unselected (Alt-H)
Hide everything not selected.
Vertex Box Selection
This has been extended to also work in the 3D view. It works with patches and terrain only.
Textures
Shift-A
Select a texture in the texture browser and press this to select all the brushes using that texture.
Misc
Make Weaponclip
This makes a piece of geometry not solid to player and AI collision but solid to bullets. Note even things with shaders which specify not solid to bullets will become solid to bullets.
Make Non-Colliding
This makes a piece of geometry not solid to anything including bullets and grenades.
Go to position
Enter the cooridinates you get from typing \viewpos in the console in game to set your camera position there.
Surface Inspector
The surface properties dialog has a "Sample size" edit box with spin buttons. You can use this to set the size of lightmap samples. A value of 0 means to use the default sample size. This is whatever argument you give to -samplesize on the q3map command line, or 16 by default. The only way to change the lightmap sample size of a surface is to edit it in the surface properties dialog. The sample size is not changed when you do any texturing work outside this dialog. The sample size is copied when you duplicate a brush.
Worldspawn Key Values
_color
This is a key value for the worldspawn which sets the ambient color. Values are RGB and scale is 0 to 1.
ambient
This is a key value for the worldspawn which sets ambient light level. 0 is no ambient, 1 would be fullbright ambient. (0.1 - 0.3 recommended)
diffusefraction
Percentage (0 to 1) of the total sunlight which is diffuse vs direct. (0.3 - 0.7 recommended)
suncolor
same as _color but for the direct sunlight
sundiffusecolor
same as _color for the diffuse sunlight
sundirection
yaw pitch roll. -30 160 0 would mean the sun is 30 degrees below the horizon and coming from the upper left in the 2D view in the editor (more left than upper). Apply these values to a node and observe where the arrow points. The arrow points at the sun.
sunlight
total brightness of the direct sun and the diffusesun and the ambient combined. IE increasing value of the diffusesun or the ambient will not increase the total brightness, only the amount of the total which is diffuse or ambient. The scale is 0 to 2 with 0 being total darkness and 1 being surfaces directly hit are fullbright. values above 1 increase the number of surfaces which will be fullbright. IW uses about .7 for night time and 1.3 to 2 for daytime.
New Buttons
Toggle camera movement modes
Two different styles of moveing the camera in the 3D view best to try them and see which you like better.
Toggle alpha rendering of textures (button looks like half a tree with 9 blue dots)
Toggle this between seeing the alpha on unselected trees correctly and seeing the alpha on decals and alpha blended terrain correctly.
Toggle selecting entities (button is an E with a slash through it)
Dont select entities in the 3D or 2D windows.
Toggle drawing portalnodraw surfaces (button is a red D)
Dont draw the common/portalnodraw surfaces. Useful for working on portals, shows you only the surfaces which matter (the common/portal ones).
Tolerant Weld (button is a TW)
See Joining Terrain Patches Method 2 for common use.
Toggle selecting models (button is an M with a slash through it)
Dont select models in the 2D/3D windows. Useful in maps with lots of trees.
Toggle "tree/grass placement mode" (button is a green and white arrow pointing down)
Switches the Ctrl-Alt left and middle click button functions to "tree and grass placement mode". When in this mode entities placed using those two shortcuts will randomly vary in size and rotation.
To create a terrain patch, select a brush and go to the Patch menu at the top. Select Simple Terrain Mesh. A Terrain Density box will appear. This dictates how many vertices wide and tall the patch will be.
Terrain patches are textured much like a normal patch. Shift+S will bring up the Patch Properties menu. A terrain patch can use Cap, Set, Natural, and Fit like a normal patch. A terrain patch can also cycle through different Cap settings by using Ctrl+Shift+N. This is useful for getting a terrain patch textured with minimal distortion.
Terrain patches can be joined using a few different methods.
Method 1: This method is best for joining 2 specific vertices. Select 2 terrain patches and show the vertices with the V key. Select the 2 vertices you would like joined and then press Ctrl+K. The vertices will join.
Method 2: This method is best for joining multiple vertices. Click on the TW box in the toolbar at the top right. Select the 2 patches you want to join. They must be close enough for them join, when they are a highlighted line will connect the vertices that will snap together. You can drag select as many of the vertices as you like and they will connect to their highlighted partner.
Note that the first patch you select will be static and not alter, the second patch is the one that will deform after the vertices are snapped together.
TW stands for tolerant weld. The distance at which the editor will do the tolerant welding is controlled in the Edit/Preferences menu.
Once multiple terrain patches are joined together, you can convert them into one larger patch. Simply select the terrain patches you would like to act as one and press Ctrl+K. You can now manipulate the multiple patches as one.
Columns and Rows can easily be added or removed from your terrain patch. Select 2 or more vertices on a row or column and press Ctrl+Shift+A and a row or column will be added. Press Ctrl+Shift+Q to remove the row or column. If you have merged vertices together using method 1 then you may be selecting more than two vertices when it looks like you have only selected two, since that method doesn’t remove vertices, it only makes them be in the same position.
The smallest piece of terrain is made up of 4 vertices which are split into two triangles. You can reverse where the triangle splits the patch with the turn edges button which is the square one with the red and green x through the middle. This is useful for turning the edges to all face in on mortar craters.
Matrix Transpose
Press Shift-Ctrl-M to reorient/rotate the textures on a terrain patch. Useful so you don’t have to re-rotate the texture each time you change the mapping.
At the top, there are three sliders. The first is called "inner radius", the second "outer radius", and the last "amplitude". Anything inside inner radius of a "hot spot" gets moved at full magnitude, anything outside outer radius does not get moved at all, and anything in the middle gets moved by a smooth ramp function that is basically a smoothed-out linear falloff. Increasing the amplitude makes the effect more pronounced for some effects. The radius checks are only in the x-y axis. In other words, the radius between two points is the distance you see between them in the XY top-down view.
Under these 3 sliders are the soft selection modes. Checking these will allow you to do different functions, which will be detailed out shortly.
For all other modes, any patches you want to effect must be selected, and you must be in normal brush-selection mode. To paint, hold down the ALT key and the left or right mouse button. Painting only happens when you move the mouse. Painting works in the 2D and the 3D views. The "hot spot" for any painting action is the point on the patch mesh that is currently under the cursor.
Paint height only works in conjunction with the Height selection at the bottom of the menu. This lets you raise and lower terrain by “painting” the terrain. The left mouse button causes the height to gradually increase, and the right mouse button causes it to gradually lower. The amount that height changes depends on grid size and on the amplitude setting of the dialog.
Flatten works in conjunction with a Height, RGB, Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha.
+ Height - This will flatten affected vertices down to the Z-coordinate set in the Height box on the bottom right of the dialog box.
+ RGB - This allows you to color the terrain with whatever color you choose in the color menu. You can also paint on just the red value by choosing Red, just blue by choosing Blue, and green by choosing Green. (Alt-left click paints color, Alt-right click removes color).
+ Alpha - This allows you to make portions of your texture transparent. It is especially useful for blending 2 textures together. For example, to create a dirt path through a grassy area you would first create the base, which would be the dirt path (a terrain patch with a dirt texture). Next, you would copy and paste that same patch on top of itself and change its texture to a grass texture set up for alpha blending. Finally, you alpha out the portion of the grass texture where you would like the dirt path to show through. Note that alpha should be used on shaders that are set up for alpha blending (examples of these textures are found in terrain.shader). (Alt-left click paints transparency, Alt-right click removes transparency).
Smooth only works in conjunction with the Height selection at the bottom of the menu. This lets you smooth terrain by “painting” the terrain. The left and right mouse buttons work to equalize the terrain by raising and lowering surrounding vertices. This gives the terrain a less bumpy appearance.
Noise only works in conjunction with the Height selection at the bottom of the menu. This works the opposite way of Smooth by making the terrain more bumpy and uneven.
Drag Up/Down only works in conjunction with the Height selection at the bottom of the menu. This is the only soft selection mode that works in vertex-editing mode. This is basically normal patch vertex dragging, except it has smooth falloff around each selected vertex and it only changes the Z component.
This mode allows you to grab the height, color, and alpha value of terrain by holding the left mouse button and dragging on a section of terrain.
Disabled simply disables soft selection while the dialog box is open.
Allow soft selection on unhighlighted patches
Allows modification to all patches inside the "hot spot" regardless of whether they are currently selected.
Only perform soft selection while this dialog is open
Allows soft selection while this menu is closed when unchecked.