Creating Moving Brushes
Movers are a very important component in map making. Movers are our doors, our elevators, etc. The only problem with movers, is that they are so god awful confusing to implement at first. That's where we come in. In this lesson you will learn:
How to create
moving brushes.
How to use keyframing to animate moving brushes.
To start off with build a room. Make sure your room is at least 512 high, because we are going to add an elevator to it. For my example I chose 512x1024x1024. Add lighting and a player start position. Texture it as you would like.
Now create another room with similar dimsensions. Place this room so that it does not touch your original room, similar to the way we placed our sky box. Subtract the cube from your world. Textures in this room are not important. This area is going to be the temporary storage space where we create our movers.
Now
it is time to create our mover, in this case an elevator. Build a
cube with dimensions similar to this 6x256x256. This cube should
be placed in our holding cube away from the world. Select a
texture that is befit for an elevator and add this brush to your
world. Now highlight this brush and Brush Instersect it using the button icon that is above and to the
left.
Now
drag this brush to where you wish to place it in the world(on the
floor would be a good idea). Be sure to place this in our
original room, and not our storage room. Now click on the Add Movable Brush icon. Now we can edit our mover
properties. This step has confused a lot of people because it
leaves the red template brush on the screen. There are two ways
around this. One(the one I prefer) is simply to drag your
template brush off of the screen. The other is to hit the B key to hide it. I prefer the former, because it
is irritating(to me at least) to look all over for my brush, to
only then remember to hit B again to
unhide it.
Either way you have chosen, you should now see a purple cube on your screen, highlight it and right click. Select Mover Properties. Highlight the Movement->DesiredRotation->Pitch and change that value to 1. Change the value of Movement->RotationRate->Pitch to 10.
One more step to go, and that is to tell our object where to move. For our elevator there will only be 2 locations, top and bottom. The current position is automatically keyframe 0, so we need to edit the raised position. Right click on our mover and from the menu select Mover Keyframe->Keyframe 1. Drag our mover up to the middle of the room. Now select Mover Keyframe->Keyframe 0. Our elevator should be back on the floor.
That is it, we are done. Rebuild Geometry and run the map. You will notice that when you step on the elevator it rises. You can do much more with movable brushes, and we will experiment with them in more detail later.
You can grab the example for this page by clicking here.