Motivation
Microbrush is a specialized brush editor with VMF export.
It is used for creating architecture to be used with Valve's Hammer for Half-Life 2 and other Source Engine-based games.
Before the time of Valve's Source Engine, I worked a lot with Radiant, and found some mechanisms in Hammer rather annoying, compared to how things were done in Radiant.
For instance, there is no real brush-based facedrag in Hammer, and all the aiming with the mouse for reaching the drag and resize handles is unnecessarily time-consuming.
Paint-select is another underestimated feature in mapping, first seen in Call of Duty Radiant.
I have mixed different concepts and also came up with some news ones (e.g. for the 3D grid) to create an editor which finally enabled me to map at reasonable speed.
Normally one would map half a level and then possibly lose motivation, but with this tool, the idea of specific architecture can be realized a lot faster.
This tool is free of charge, and is targeted for Windows Vista x86 (32 bit), but should work with Windows XP too.
Some features
- All-3D editing experience with actually useful 3D grid
- Consistent brush editing
- Brush translation, mirroring, cloning, rotation (by 90 degrees), arbitrary clipping, merging
- Paint select, and various misc. functions derived from an actual workflow to speed things up
- VMF export for Valve's Hammer editor
