Create Brush Tool

[kduske]

Move the brush creation mechanism to a separate tool to allow for more flexibility. This will also free the left drag operation (if no tool is active) for lasso selection, which is sorely needed.

The new create brush mechanism should work as follows. The user essentially creates a set of vertices and hits Enter to create the convex hull of all those vertices. To create the vertices, the user can:

• Left drag on some surface to create a quad on that surface.
• Left click on some surface to add a single vertex.
• Shift click on some face to add that face as a polygon to the set of vertices.

The created polygons and vertices can be modified similarly to the vertex tool:

• Left drag a vertex (a single vertex or a vertex belonging to a polygon) to move it around. Moving a vertex onto another vertex (of the same polygon if it belongs to one) will fuse the vertices.
• Left drag an edge to move that edge around.
• Double click on an edge to add a vertex to that edge.
• Left drag a polygon to move that polygon around.
• Alt-Left drag to duplicate a polygon and move the duplicate perpendicular to the polygons normal.

These operations are restricted as follows:

• The vertices, edges, and polygons can only be moved on the plane defined by the polygon (if they belong to one).
• Single vertices can be moved around freely.

The old create brush tool is subsumed by these operations. To emulate it, the user creates a quad by dragging, then Alt drags that quad to create a cuboid. This requires more clicks than for the old tool, but the added flexibility of the brush creation outweighs this drawback. In general, the new tool will make it easy to create arbitrary brush shapes, for example:

• Create an octagon on some surface and Alt-drag it to create a pipe.
• Create a quad on some surface and create a single vertex above it to create a pyramid.
• Shift click on two (non-parallel) surfaces to quickly connect them with a brush.

[necros0]

Can you correct me if I'm wrong, I want to check if I got this.

• I want to make a simple 4 sided column brush.
• I click on the floor 4 times in a square
• I Alt+click and drag upwards and make my column

Do I need to be clicking inside my newly created 2D shape?
Is this a step by step process, eg: I have to confirm my 2D shape before I can extrude it.
Can you only extrude in cardinal directions?
What if the 2D shape is not planar?

This is a very different way of creating brushes, so I need to have a better idea of what you're talking about.

[kduske]

1. Yes, this is one of the ways you could create a 4 sided column. You would have to alt-drag on the square polygon to duplicate it and move the duplicate along the normal.
2. This is a step by step process, as the initial shape is not a valid brush yet. You have to hit Enter to create the brush.
3. What do you mean by cardinal directions?
4. It doesn't matter if the shape is planar. You have to think of this process as creating some vertices and creating their convex hull. Everything that's explained in the description is just a way of creating a set of vertices. So if you create four vertices by clicking, and they are not coplanar, you have created a tetrahedron.

[kduske]

This is now implemented.