Brushes are the building blocks of Quake levels. Here’s how to get some into your level.
Creating brushes can happen in a variety of ways.
Brush Builders
Brush Builders
You can access the brush builders at the top of the 2D viewport. Clicking the control there that says “Cube” on it will produce a menu of brush builder options:
Choosing a brush builder from this menu will create a brush in the level of that shape using the currently selected texture.
Orientation
One thing that it not obvious is that things like cylinders and spikes will be created using the orientation of the 2D viewport. Meaning that whichever axis you are looking down at is the axis that the brush will align to.
This is handy for creating cylinders laying on their sides, for example.
Brush Bounds
When you create a brush using a brush builder and you have brushes selected in your level, ToeTag will create one brush for each selected brush and it will size it so that it fits within the bounds of the selected brushes.
A good work flow for this is to lay out cube brushes where you want to place, say, some pipes. Select those cube brushes and create 8 sided cylinders and you’ll see that the pipes are placed where the old brushes were.
For example:
Duplication
Duplication of existing brushes is easy. You can either copy/paste them using the normal controls for that or you can press SPACE to duplicate the current selection.
The primary difference between these methods is that copy/paste will drop the new brushes down at the same location as the old ones while duplication will offset by the size of the grid.
By Dragging
If you’ve used QERadient before, you’ll know how this works. In the 2D viewport, you can CMD+SHIFT+LEFT_CLICK+DRAG to create a box shape. Pressing the ENTER key will then create a new brush at that location with a depth of the current grid size. Like this: