Mapping with vertex blended terrain patches:

[Bikerdude]

So as many mappers may know, getting NPC's to path find over the top of func_static patch based terrain is a ball ache. The current method is to place lots of perpendicular MC brush at varying heights under the patch, loosely aligned to the surface of the terrain etc.

When the terrain brush is all one texture type, the above is a viable solution. But when you introduce vertex painted terrain patches, the issue of different foot sounds becomes a question. As in for reasons I don't understand yet, you only hear one foot sound type, eg grass or stone etc.

So I came up with a technique that I don't know if anyone has used before. To get around the foot sound issue, I place a nodraw solid brush (NDS) with different textures (grass/stone/etc) to cover the different parts of the terrain .

And as every mapper knows, trying to raise/lower the vert point of a square brush, inevitably causes other verts to move when you don't want them too. So my solution was cut the square brush up into triangles, so for a square brush that's 4 triangles.

Here is an example of a large vertex painting terrain brush, with 3 different textures that I have placed a bunch of NDS brush under.

[Arcturus]

18 hours ago, Bikerdude said:

And as every mapper knows, trying to raise/lower the vert point of a square brush, inevitably causes other verts to move when you don't want them too.

You can create pretty much any terrain made of brushes using Blender's .map exporter. Add a subdivided plane, pull some vertices up, and maybe snap to grid for good measure.

When exported with "terrain" option the bottom stays flat. How it looks in DarkRadiant:

Parts that were raised are automatically split into triangles.

Anyway, since you can have only one sound type per material, you could split your terrain in two parts with different materials and different sounds.

[Frost_Salamander]

19 hours ago, Bikerdude said:

And as every mapper knows, trying to raise/lower the vert point of a square brush, inevitably causes other verts to move when you don't want them too.

I raised a bug about this: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6714

@func_klaus I forgot about this one, would you be able to have a look?

[Bikerdude]

On 8/20/2026 at 6:52 AM, Arcturus said:

You can create pretty much any terrain made of brushes using Blender's .map exporter. Add a subdivided plane, pull some vertices up, and maybe snap to grid for good measure.

That's a cool feature that I will have to have a look into at some point, however - 

- you would be doing ping-pong workflow between blender and DR, trying to guess in blender where the raised parts of the terrain should be and then finding in DR its cliping into or cover something etc.
- texturing on brush would be a nightmare in DR, and this would also have to be done in blender. This would be fine if the terrain brush was the only one in that location, but if it had adjacent terrain that the texture had to align too - more ping-pong.

The above only works if your creating the terrain/s right at the start when blocking out your map, but some mappers don't work that way (ie me) I build stuff on the fly and out of order and sometime come back to a map to do a detail pass and change a bunch of stuff.

[I.C.H.I.]

On 8/20/2026 at 11:34 AM, Frost_Salamander said:

I raised a bug about this: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=6714

Are you sure this is a bug? Brushes aren't made of polygons, they use planes and vertices in the editor aren't actually real vertices.

It was like that since the old days but some modern level editors(like NetRadiant-Custom) can autosplit faces when you drag one vertex.

Edited August 21 by I.C.H.I.

[Arcturus]

Brushes exported from Blender will keep their global coordinates when imported into radiant.

[Frost_Salamander]

On 8/21/2026 at 12:29 PM, I.C.H.I. said:

Are you sure this is a bug? Brushes aren't made of polygons, they use planes and vertices in the editor aren't actually real vertices.

It was like that since the old days but some modern level editors(like NetRadiant-Custom) can autosplit faces when you drag one vertex.

No I'm not sure.  Maybe it should be rebranded as a feature request...