Advanced Texturing :: Surgeon
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In the Basic Texturing tutorial you were shown how to texture a brush and how to texture the face of a brush. In this tutorial you will learn how to rotate and resize textures on a brush. You will also learn how to texture patch meshes and cylinders. Its really not as difficult as the tutorial title makes it sound.

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Texture Manipulation : Normal Brushes / Faces
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If you study the image below you will see that the texture doesn't look right. It isn't fitting the brush properly and quite frankly looks stupid. I know through experience that the size of the texture that i'm using is 256 x 256. My wall is 384 long by 192 high. Thus the texture doesn't fit.

So how do we solve this problem ? Thats where the Surface Inspector comes in. The Surface Inspector (hit the s key with the fact selected) has many funky options, but at the moment we are only interested in a few.

The first 2 options we are going to look at are the horizontal and vertical scale. You will notice two figures in the boxes. The first is the actual scale of the texture. The second is the increments that you can increase or decrease the scale in. You can either use the handy arrows or you can enter a value in yourself.

By increasing or decreasing the scale of a texture you can make the texture fit the brush. Give the texture a vertical / horizontal scale of 0.5 means that it would fit a brush that is 128 x 128. A scale of 2 would double the textures size. So to get my texture to fit my wall, I will give it a scale of 0.75. I give it both a reduced vertical and horizontal scale because most textures look wierd if they have different scales.

Now you see it fits the wall perfectly.

The horizotal / vertical shifts are used to move the texture around the face of your brush, because sometimes your textures can be misaligned. The rotate option rotates the texture on the face of the brush. Easy !!

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Texture Manipulation : Patch Meshes
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Texturing Patch Meshes is slightly different. If you tried to to use the Surface Inspector to texture a patch mesh all you get is a severely blurred texture which is no good to you. Instead, you must use the Patch Inspector and even then only a few options will work properly.

As you can see it is fairly similar to the Surface Inspector. The only things that you can use without messing the texture up are:

Set : The texture will fit across the patch based on the x and y values given. Values of 1 x 1 will fit the texture to the patch mesh, whilst valuse of 2 x 2 will repeat it twice across the mesh.

Natural : I'm not 100 % sure of what this does. It's some kind of texture transformation to allow the texture to align with geometry nicely.

Fit : Fits the texture to the patch mesh.

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Texture Manipulation : Cylinders
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These are textured in a similar way as patch meshes. The main difference is that you can use the horizontal / vertical scale and shift options as well as the rotate texture function. This means that texturing cylinders is much easier than texturing patch meshes.

This also applies to Bevels and Endcaps and their caps.

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Other tricks and conclusion.
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If you have a middle mouse button you can use this to tranfer the properties of a texture from one face to another. Simply select the face that you want the texture to be applied to. Then click on the textured face with your middle mouse button. The texture should be transferred onto the new brush. This is really useful for quick and efficient texturing.

Textures are a vital part of your map so knowing how to use them properly is vital for any mapper. I hope this tutorial has been useful to you and if you have any more questions please don't hesitate to use the forum.

Need any help : Ask in the Forum