Editing Tips for Beginners

written by Springheel

I thought I would write down some of my findings as a new mapper, to help other people who are just getting into mapping for The Dark Mod.

First of all, you should definitely start with Fidcal's awesome A - Z Beginner Full Guide Start Here! tutorial. It is an excellent introduction. I followed it loosely for about three hours, and at that point felt I was ready to start on a map of my own.

One of the most important tips I learned from Fidcal's tutorial was what he calls the 'curtain' method of making brushes. This is useful any time you want to split brushes in half (to texture the top and bottom differently, for example).

Essentially, you

• Step 1: select the brush
• hit "space" to clone it. There will now be two brushes occupying the same space, so don't deselect yet.
• Step 2: by dragging the mouse outside the brush, shrink it to the size you want (like pulling a curtain down).
• Step 3: select the original brush (which is still the original size) and shrink it so that its edge matches the edge of the other brush)

You now have two brushes instead of one, and can texture them both differently (like stone on the bottom and wooden beams on the top).

Disappearing Brushes

A few people have experienced a problem where brushes appear fine in the editor, but after dmapping and trying the map in D3, the brushes are gone. If this happens, try snapping the brushes to the grid (under the Grid menu). This solved the problem when it happened to me.