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BRUSH CLIPPING

"Machismo"
cool_machismo@yahoo.com

### INTRODUCTION

This tutorial will show you how to cut or clip away parts of brushes. Its going to be a Wham, Bang, Thank you ma'am kind of tutorial.

### CLIPS AHOY!

First and foremost, go into brush clipping mode by hitting the button given on the left, you can get out of this mode at any time by hitting the camera button - .

REMEMBER: You can perform a brush clip on the red active builder brush or on any brush that you may have added to the world before.

Now after having enabled the brush clipping mode, make a builder brush - 256x256x256 should do just fine for now. When you position the cursor now over any of the views you will see that the crosshair has changed to the clipping crosshair. Clipping works by assigning two points (or three points) that define from where to where the brush should be clipped. The following shows the various functions that are available:

First things first, lets place the clip markers that tell the Editor the area which we want to clip away. Now since we are already in "BrushClip Mode" and have a brush that we want to clip, do the following to place the first clip marker:
HOLD DOWN CTRL+RIGHT MOUSE AND CLICK IN ANY 2D-VIEW
You can select the clip marker at any time by just left clicking on the clip. Now select the clip and move it to the same place as I have done:
For now we will place a total of only two clip markers. Place the second clip marker like how you did the first one and move it to the following positions like this:

The direction in which the clipping marker is facing is important as this is the part that will be clipped (cut?) away or destroyed. You can flip or turn it the other way by hitting the flip normal button []. In the above picture if you wanted the right side of the line between the two clip markers to be clipped away you just need to flip the normal first.

After the placement of clip markers performing the clip is as easy as first selecting the brush to be clipped and then hitting this button []. The part facing the normal just gets cut away like in the picture below:

### TRANSFORMING A BRUSH PERMANENTLY

If you keep trying to clip a brush and you are unable to do so you need to first transform the brush permanently. To transform a brush just select it right click and in the menu the appears, under transform hit Transform Permanently.
NOTE 1: It is not necessary that you have to transform all the brushes, if clipping doesn't work then you can proceed with the transformation and then try again.
NOTE 2: Will usually crop up due to vertex editing.

### SPLITTING A BRUSH

This button allows you to do just that. Its like taking an axe and splitting wood into two:
Use this button to clip away parts of brushes that have been added or subtracted to the game world.

### 3D CLIPPING

Till now you used only 2 clip markers this is referred to as 2d clipping as this involves using only one of the 2d views. When you introduce the third clip marker this is called 3d clipping, since you will have to adjust the 3rd clip marker in at least one other view. Try this, first introduce two clip markers and align them in a line in the in the side view and then introduce the 3rd clip marker and move it slightly up (see picture):
Think of 3d clipping as proceeding from point 1 to 2 and then to 3.The editor first clips away the part from the 1st clip marker to the second clip marker (like how we did manually in the first part of the tutorial), with this brush it then automatically proceeds from 2 to clip point 3 and clips the brush again. What you see is the resulting brush. You may need to reread this paragraph a coupla times to figure what I mean. The best way to verify this would be to first clip the brush manually using 2 clip markers, then with the resultant brush move clip marker 1 to the same position that clip marker 3 was in the 3d clip - now if you perform a clip (a split actually since in this example it is a subtracted brush) you will get the same brush as before.