Vertex Manipulation Basics

Vertex manipulation is the act of moving around a courner of a brush to a different location on the grid. The advantage to vertex manipulation is being able to create a larger variety of shapes in your brushwork that just the standard Primitives. The process can seem a bit confuzing at first, but after some closer examination, it will become an essential part of your map making process.



The image above is of the vertex manipluation button, located on the big toolbar on the left side of the hammer interface. In order to manipulate a brush, you must first select the brush with the selection tool.(the big arrow at the top of the same toolbar) The brush will turn red when selected. Next With the brush still selected, click on the vertex manipulation button. Now the brush should aprear to be almost transparent looking in the 3d window, and have white dots on each of its courners and yellow dots in the center of each edge.(standard mode)



When your brush look like the one above, click on the vertex manipulatino button again, and notice how the yellow dots disapear.(white mode) Click the button yet again, and the white dots will turn yellow and the old yellow dots will reapear.(yellow mode) Then click on the button one last time to bring both sets of dots back. Now making dots apear and reapear is not a very vital part of the vertex manipulation process, but you wil enevitally get your dots mixed up and its nice to know how to get them back.

Now as for the functions of the dots, in the standard mode, the white dots control the location of that brush courner and the yellow dots control the whole edge of the brush much like the dots do when you have the brush normall selected. White mode is the same as standard mode without the yellow dots and yellow mode is the same as standard mode without the white dots. Yes, even though there apears to be dots on the courners of your brush while in yellow mode when looking in a 2d window, look a little closer in your 3d window to find the real source of these dots. HINT: they are on the edges of the brush that are perpendicular to that 2d window. If you still dont under stand dont worry about it, there will be no instance when you have to use white or yellow mode.

Enough with modes and dot color, its time to manipulate some brushes. If you haven't already, place a brush in the center of the grid like shown. 8 by 8 by 8 grid lines centered on the grid axis.(by grid is set to 16 units but your grid size does not effect the outcome of this tutorial)



Select the brush and then click the vertex manipulation button. Now in the (x,y) 2d window, click on the the bottom right dot with your cursor. The dot should now have turned red. Now click and drag the dot to the left 4 grid lines and up 4 grid lines. Select the bottom left white dot and drag it up 4 grid lines. Select the top right white dot and drag it 4 grid lines to the left. Finally, in your (x,z) 2d window, select the bottom yellow dot and drag it up 4 squares and then click on the arrow button at the top of the left hand tool bar to view the changes you've made.(the last step, which esentiall exits out of vertex manipulation mode and applies the manipulations to the brsuh, is the very important and shouldn't be overlooked) If all went well you block should look like shown. 4 by 4 by 4 grid units.



Now the above process could have more easily been done by simply selecting the brush and using standard transformation, but wasnt it more fun using vertex manipulation. ;) Copy and paste the new block so that there are 4 total blocks surounding the grid axis like shown.



If you didnt notice, when you select a dot from one the the 2d windows to manipluate, you are also selecting the do driectly "behind" it. While that did not effect anything in the first set of manipulations, in this next exercise, it will be necessary to select dots in the 3d window to ensure you only have on dot selected.

Now for some more useful manipulations. The goal of this set of manipulations is to produce a pyramid shape out of the four blocks. To begin select the top left block in the (x,y) 2d window and complete the fallowing steps.

NOTE: Up untill this point i have been saying "white dot" but these white dots are accually called vertices and they will be refered to as that from here out.

1. Select the top outer edge verticy, the top left verticy in both (x,y) and (x,z) windows, and drag it inward until it is on top of the top innre verticy. Hammer will ask you if you want to merge the vertices, click yes.







2. Select the top middle vertices, one verticy over in each direction from the top outer verticy(see picture), an drag them both down and merge each them with the verticy under them.









3. Repeat this process for the other 3 brushes and you will have a nice little pyramid.




4.Try some manipulations on your own and see if you can make the pyramid taller/shorter/fatter/skinnier.(HINT: move the verticies at the point of the pyramid)

Congradulations, you have learned the basics of vertex manipulation and successfully manipulated a box into a pyramid.