If you’re going to get any kind of interesting level done, you’re going to need to know how to change the shape of your brushes.
Primitives
Basics
The simplest way to change the shape of a brush is to click one of it’s vertices, edges or faces and drag it.
Brushes
Selecting a brush will give you a display like this:
To select more than one brush at a time, hold down the CMD key while clicking. This is how all selections work so I won’t be mentioning it in every section below.
This doesn’t count as reshaping, of course, so let’s get to the good stuff.
Edges
An edge is the line between 2 vertices. Selecting one looks like this:
Vertices
The vertices are the square boxes at the ends of the edges. Selecting one looks like this:
Faces
Selecting a face can be done at any time, regardless of whether or not the brush is currently selected. This is to make applying textures easier on you. To select a face, you can SHIFT+CLICK any face that you see. A selected face looks like this:
Faces are somewhat unique in that if you select faces and then start to drag that face, the editor will select the brush and then select the vertices on that face automatically. It can be disorienting the first time it happens but it’s logical once you think about it. It looks like this when it does the switch on you:
Reshaping
OK, so now you have a brush, face, edge or vertex selected. How do you reshape the brush then?
Drag it.
Hold down CTRL and DRAG the mouse. Depending on the viewport you are in, you will drag the selected elements of the brush in that direction. Starting with a cube, you can easily get something that looks like this:
You can, of course, get more complicated with stuff like CSG operations but that’s a more advanced tutorial.
Auto Face Dragging
A quick way to reshape a brush in the 2D viewports is to select the brush and then doing CTRL+CMD+LEFT_CLICK+DRAG to drag faces on it. The way it works is that the editor will decide which face is most appropriate to drag based on where you clicked in the viewport. This is worth playing with since you can reshape a brush quickly. It looks like this when you get it right:
