Morphing the Ground (Displacement Tool)

Displacements are basically used to create terrain, usually hills. Here's the basic idea:

1.) First, you will need to create a brush where you want your terrain to be. Make sure to have this brush textured with the material you want your terrain to be.



2.) Find your brush and open up your texture application tool . Select (click on) the face you want to morph. Hold CTRL to select several at once.



3.) After selecting the faces you want, click on the Displacement Tab on the Texture Application Tool dialogue box.



4.) With the faces still selected, click the "Create" button and press Ok, keeping the default number (changing this number will affect the number of triangles showing up on the faces/brush). You will see that the faces you selected are now covered in a triangle mesh. The faces you did not select are now gone. Be aware of this. Now it is time to morph your terrain.



5.) Once you are ready to begin morphing, click the "Paint Geometry" button. Now, move your mouse over the triangle mesh. You will see that your mouse cursor highlights vertices. Now, begin right- or left-clicking the vertices. They should move up and down (if they do not, hold Alt and Shift and right-click the face, then try again).



NOTE: In the Paint Geometry menu, there are two sliders. The "Distance" slider controls how fast/far the terrain moves when you right or left click on them. The "Spatial Radius" slider controls how large the circle selecting the vertices is. It pretty much controls how many vertices can be moved at once.

You have morphed the ground! You can now input a great deal of terrain work much faster than with the vertex manipulation tool.

A Closer Look

Displacement Restrictions: You cannot use a displacement face on any entity. The compiler will return an error if you do.

You cannot have a displacement on any shape of face but a quadrilateral.

Displacements do not block leaks. Frequently they are used as the only floor in an outdoors map; in order to prevent leaks, a non-entity block covered in the tools/toolsnodraw texture is placed immediately behind the displacement.



Select: Used to select faces for creation, deletion, or modification. Left-click to select; hold CTRL to select multiple faces.

Paint Geometry: If a displacement(s) is selected, allows the user to move its vertices around. It has this submenu:

Effect: Whether clicking should raise and lower vertices by Distance, move them Distance away from the base face, or use Radius to attempt to line up a specific vertex with those around it. Spatial: If checked, all Effect operations will occur to the clicked-on vertex and, to a degree, the vertices around it. This implements Radius to determine how broad the effect should be. If unchecked, you can still choose an effect size--to a degree--with Brush. Axis: Determines the axis along which the Effect should occur. X, Y, and Z are, of course, east/west, north/south, and up/down, respectively. Subdiv Normal works only on selections of multiple faces that have been Subdivided (below), and usually only when Spatial is unchecked; it finds a direction perpendicular to the subdivide curve (the curve's normal) and uses that as the effect axis. Face Normal should act along the face's normal, but it doesn't; instead, hold CTRL and ALT and right-click the face to use its normal with Face Normal selected. Brush: If Spatial is unchecked, you can choose an effect size here in lieu of using Radius. For the Raise/Lower effect, 1 affects the clicked-on vertex, 2 affects that and one adjacent vertex in each direction, 3 affects that and two adjacent vertices in each direction, etc. For the Raise To effect, 1 through 5 have no effect; 5(circle) creates a circular plateau, raising the clicked-on vertex and two in each direction; 1(circle) raises the clicked-on vertex. The Smooth effect has only one size. If Spatial is checked, Soft-Edge reduces the strength of the effect near the edge of Radius (creating a less profound edge to the effect); Hard-Edge affects all vertices within Radius equally and ignores those outside Radius (creating an obvious edge). Distance: The Raise/Lower and Raise To effects both use Distance as a measure of how far to move vertices when the effect is used. The Smooth effect attempts to pull nearby vertices to within Distance of the clicked-on vertex. Radius: Radius of the effect. Ignored if Spatial is unchecked. AutoSew: Automatically forces Sew (below) upon all selected faces whenever a vertex is moved.

Paint Alpha: Used with blended textures. Works almost exactly the same way as Paint Geometry, except Value replaces Distance. Value is a number from 0 to 255 that expresses how much the second texture should overpower the first--0 is none at all, 255 is full opacity.

Invert Alpha: Pretty simple: inverts the alpha on the selected face. Texture1 replaces Texture2 in opacity, and vice versa.

Create: Creates a displacement of the selected face or faces.

Destroy: Removes the displacement from the selected face or faces.

Subdivide: When multiple displacement faces on different planes are selected, attempts to morph them together into a single curved surface representative of the formerly flat faces. This requires that each selected face share a side with at least one other selected face.

Noise: Randomly moves each vertex along the face's normal by a random amount (between the chosen Min and Max).

Sew: When multiple faces (not necessarily displacements) are selected, attempts to move displacement vertices such that there are no gaps between any of the brushes involved. Any two selected faces must share a side, or one face's side must begin at some other face's corner and end at exactly the midpoint of that second face's side.

Power: Either 2, 3, or 4. Controls how many vertices into which to split a face in order to create a displacement. Click Apply to see changes.

Elev: Moves an entire displacement face a certain number of units along the face's normal. Click Apply to see changes.

Scale: Scales the distances between vertices along the face's normal. Click Apply to see changes.

Masks: Shows or hides the vertex mesh and selection masks on the selected face(s).

Auto-Subdivide: This should automatically Subdivide faces as they are edited. Does it work? Is it even necessary?