Texturing in DarkRadiant

In DarkRadiant there are quite some texturing tools available. In order to yield the best results, it's of course useful to know how these tools work, which is what this document is trying to cover.

Brushes vs. Patches

There are some texturing commands that work differently for brushes and patches, because of the way these primitives store their texture information. So beware that using the same command on a brush doesn't always yield the same result when used on patches, although DarkRadiant tries to do its best. Read here to gain some insight about how patches and brushes are technically textured.

Natural

Natural for one works differently for patches as for brushes. Basically it tries to apply an undistorted texture with the default scale on the target. This is of course more easily accomplished for brushes (because their textures are always undistorted) than for patches.

Texture Copy & Paste

These are the most powerful texturing tools in DarkRadiant. There are several of them available, all can be accessed via the Middle Mouse Button (MMB):

• MMB: Copy Texture to Clipboard
• Ctrl-MMB: Project Texture from Clipboard onto Target
• Shift-MMB: Paste Texture Natural (undistorted and seamless) onto Target
• Alt-MMB: Copy Texture Coordinates (Patches only, must have same dimensions)

See below for a short introduction of these copy & paste operations.

Copy Texture

This command is available via the MMB (click into the cam view) or the Menu > Edit > Copy Shader. When using the MMB to select a texture, the shader of the clicked object is loaded into the ShaderClipboard. Once you picked your texture the name of the texture appears in the status bar and it's highlighted in the Media and the Texture Browser.

Paste Texture (Projected)

This is useful to texture patch caps or brush faces that are adjacent to each other. It can be accessed via Ctrl-MMB and the Menu > Edit > Paste Shader command. Let's have a look at the following example:

The left shot shows two brushes and a patch that has been created with the "cap selection" command. The rightmost brush is considered the "source" brush, so we copy its shader by middle-clicking it. The shader is now in the clipboard.

Now hold down the Ctrl modifier and click on the other three objects with the middle mouse button. The texture is pasted onto the target objects so that the transition between the objects is seamless - technically spoken this is a projection. Imagine that you project the texture using a video projector, it's more or less the same mechanism.

Note: It's important to note that this only works from brushes to patches, as only brush faces can be used to project textures. Patches have no uniform scale and rotation and can't be used to retrieve a plane to project the objects onto.