Operation Brushes (Water to Solid, Flood, Etc.)

[Komag]

There are 6 basic operation brushes:
Water to Air (Evaporate)
Air to Water (Flood)
Water to Solid
Solid to Water
Air to Solid
Solid to Air

If your area is full of complex architecture, just build out of a flood brush, then use and evaporate brush where you want to cut off the water, then surround the remaining water with a water to solid brush and viola, you have whatever shape you want in the midst of complex architecture that hasn't been adversly affected

Using different combinations of these operation brushes is a lifesaver for me VERY often!


Say you have already built a house with walls here and there and stuff. Now you want to make and outside window that bulges out from the house using a 6 sided cylander with a window texture on the outside edge. If you just put a solid cylinder such that half of it sticks outside the house, on which half you will put the window texture, the other half might extend into the interior and collide with some solid architecture there such as stairs or a fireplace or something. So, make the cylinder a flood brush, which will fill water wherever there was air, leaving alone any solid architecture you have already built. Then draw rectangle evaporate brush to cover the portion of the water that is on the interior - this gets rid of that water, leaving your original interior architecture as you originally had it before starting to put in the window. Finally, draw a rectangle water-to-solid brush around the remaining water which is on the outside of the house, which then becomes solid, and then you can paint on your window texture.


For further clarity, here is a simple excercise to try:

Have an open room in which to work.
Make a cylinder brush that is "flood" and have it sitting in the middle of the room.
Make a cube brush that is "evaporate" and rotate it some odd way and just stick halfway into the cylinder somewhere.
Portalize. You now have water in the room that is basically a cylinder but is missing water where the "evaporate" cube is.
Make a larger cube brush that is "water-to-solid" and stretch it big enough to totally cover the water in the room (the cylinder).
Portalize. Now you have your funky solid shape.

Now, in this example you could have just build a solid cylinder and then put an air cube in it and you'd get the same results. The difference is that sometimes the building process will disrupt surrounding architecture that you've already built and you don't want that. If you use my technique in those cases, usually you can avoid messing anything else up, because the operation brushes only manipulate the substance specified and leave everything else alone.

[xarax]

These operations can be very useful and sometimes easier than using the brush timing to insert brushes "ahead of" the pre-existing brushes to avoid the collisions. It pays to plan ahead, but when you cant/wont, these brush operations can save time and headaches.

[TRoosevelt_26]

Argh. I could have really used this yesterday pouring water around an angled railing, but instead used funny-shaped water and airbrushes to do the job. Oh, well, now I know.