Question re Snapping and Merging

[BitBasher]

Two things I haven't fully figured out yet...

1. Snapping. I used the 2D editor to make a small cube, then I rotated 360 degrees, producing four sides. The effect I wanted was a square room, with a "shaft" in the middle (an area not subtracted). When I looked at the resulting builder brush after rotating it, it didn't quite get the dimensions I wanted, so I used vertex editing/dragging, to move some of the vertexes to the right places.

When I did this, I exported my builder brush to look at the resulting coordinates. I had TONS of fractions, ie, vertexes that were NOT snapped to my grid. I tried doing this again with different settings for grid snapping and vertex snapping. For the life of me, even though the vertexes appeared to "snap" visibly in the editor to the closest 16 unit grid, they didn't numerically snap.

Is there anyway to enforce snapping to the grid exactly when I drag vertexes around???

2. This leads to Merging. Because I couldn't get vertex snapping to work, I instead started subtracting the room, working around the center shaft. In the end I subtracted four cubes to produce a subtracted room with a center shaft (non-subtracted area). Now, after I got the room subtracted, I selected all the subtracted brushes (not the builder brush), and did a MERGE on them. I *thought* this could be used to optimize all four brushes, and help join up co-planar surfaces (such as the floor). It didn't.

Hmmm, can someone help me out a bit in understanding what merging actually does, and when should I use it? I was under the impression that it really helped in culling co-planar surfaces together into one larger surface, or something to that effect.

Thanks,
BB

[BitBasher]

Ok went back to some older posts and I think I understand the merging stuff a bit more...

It seems that a change was made in UED2 that requires me to ALIGN MY SURFACES first, then select the brush that the surfaces are attached to, then do the MERGE, then do a rebuild. This seems to cull my original mismatched and separate floor surfaces into one homogenious flat surface, all aligned the same way. The resulting brush doesn't appear to look any different in it's wireframe, though.

Once I did this, I can make a wrapping builder brush around my merged brush, de-intersect it, then export the builder brush to be used as a template. When I re-use this new builder brush (importing), it seems to have inherited the merging, and subtracted new rooms using it appear to have the surfaces all aligned the way I want them.

Now, can anyone tell me if I need to do a "TRANSFORM PERMANENTLY"? What does THAT do? :eek:

BB.

[ZodiaK]

polys merge does what you already had figured out: it merges coplanar brushes on a brush - mostly used with 2d-ed brushes which have sides broken into multiple polys.

transform permanently is used when rotating/scaling brushes. ever tried rotating a scaled brush? you'll notice it doesn't stay in it's proportions but gets a bit twisted when rotated. transforming a brush permanently sort of "resets" the brush, as if it hadn't been scaled at all (what i mean here is that the scaling stays, but the editor 'thinks' it hasn't been scaled) - of course after doing this, resetting the brush now (right click->reset all, for example), won't bring it back anymore to it's original (before scaling) form.

that wasn't too clear, but hope it helps...

to your original problem of trying to make a single brush out of the four, just make a big enough box to surround the whole room, intersect, delete original brushes and substract - and there ya have your room, in one brush.

[The ultimate novice]

just make a big enough box to surround the whole room, intersect,
He meant DEintersect, of course. :)

[BitBasher]

Intersect, de-intersect --- I get em mixed up all the time too. If I use the wrong one to wrap the builder brush around an object, I usually notice, because the wrong one wraps the object AND still leaves the original cube. The right one just wraps the object, and the original cube shape is gone.

BB.