All right with our discussion of additive and subtractive brushes completed it is time to talk more about geometry brush settings. It's important to know all the different settings of our various geometric brushes before we began the gray boxing process so we can get the most mileage out of each brush type. Let's explore the box brush a little bit further here and I'm just going to drag and drop one into our level. And with that guy selected over in your Details panel, you can see that you've got a whole section of parameters labeled brush settings. Now when you go and size up or down your box brush here, you can do it in multiple ways and this confuses a lot of people. You know that when you press the spacebar, you can change between movement mode, rotation mode and scaling mode.

And I could scale a box brush like this You could do that, but I wouldn't recommend it when dealing with brushes. And here's why you can see that I've changed my brush scale. But the brush shape still shows that the box is 200 unreal units by 200 unreal units by 200 unreal units. Now we know that the x value, the X is not actually 200, because we've scaled it up 2.75 times that size. So it's not actually 200 unreal units, you got to do some math there to figure out exactly how large it is. And that can get a little complicated when looking at your paper map that you've designed and figuring out how many unreal units something should be.

So what I recommend is that when people are working with geometric brushes that they don't actually scale it but instead, use these brush settings to determine its size. Instead, I'm going to click this little yellow triangle to set this back to default. And what I'm going to do next is I am going to change my box brush here to be a little bit bigger I'm going to go 500 by 500 by 500 and then I am going to change off of scale mode by pressing the spacebar, moving it over and up a little bit and I'm gonna hit the end key to slap it down onto the ground, although that did not take so actually I'm just gonna move it down like so. And one more thing I am going to do is check this box called hollow. This is a great thing to do when trying to replicate or gray box out a building.

So what you can do with that checked hollow you can then determine the thickness of your box brush, and I'll set this to be 20 and now if I bring in a box brush, and make it subtractive you can see That I can now get to the inside of my hollowed out box brush to cut through the floor a little bit my subtractive brush there, but you get the idea. I'll go ahead and delete that out and delete this guy out. Next, let's talk about the cone. The cone of shame, right. All right, so a few parameters here that you can adjust, you got your Z value, which is currently at 300. If you set that to 500, obviously you're going to make that taller in the z plane.

Your outer radius is going to going to determine how big this top of the ice cream or should I say top or bottom of the ice cream cone. Let's flip this over. Let's be an ice cream cone, shall we? Right, get a nice little ice cream cone. They're gonna change my outer radius here to be something like 300 right a little bit wider, too wide for an ice cream cone. And our sides here are going to be Determine how many sides we're going to go something like 30 just to make it a little bit rounder, a word of caution when you are dealing with the cone or the cylinder and you get to determine how many sides, I wouldn't go crazy with this.

I know everybody likes to make it look nice and round, but you're just trying to create simple geometry here. More polygons equals worse performance. So you know what, I'm gonna be a good designer and change that to a lower value like 10. You can also make this one hollow as well. So just know that I'm going to leave Mr. cone out here for a while because we're gonna do something with it and just a bit here. Let's explore the cylinder brush next.

Here too, you've got a Z value that you can change in outer radius that you can change and sides as well that you can determine. And also you can make that hollow as well. Let's explore splore the curved stair next. Here, you can determine things like the inner radius. Let's go 300. You can see how that pushed it out from this central point right here.

400 Just to accentuate that, again, step height, you can determine how high each of these steps are. If you make it something like 50, or 100, just know that if you're going with something crazy like this, suddenly your character is going to have to jump up steps instead of walking up them. Set that back to its default step with will do exactly what you think it does make those steps wider angle of the curve instead of 90. Let's go something like 45. And you can see how that lessened that angle. And then the number of steps.

Let's say we want it to be 100. Yeah, there you go. Stairway to Heaven right there. All right. We will get rid of that guy for the time being linear stairs got much the same parameters step, length, height, width, etc. Same with your spiral stairs.

One thing I did want to mention with any of these brushes is a phenomenon that I just demonstrated by accident right here is after you click off of a brush, and then click back on it, you're going to say, Hey, where are my brush settings? Well, what happens is when you do that your brush settings get pushed down to the bottom here. And up at the top, you see a whole bunch of parameters labeled under surface properties. These have to deal with materials placed on these brushes, and we'll explore that a little bit more later. So just know that if you click off of brush and click back on, the brush settings are lower in the Details panel. Last but not least, here I'm going to bring on a sphere.

And obviously, it doesn't look too spherical here, but you got some parameters here to change it in the brush setting radius is what you think it is, if you set that to 500, you've just made a bigger spherical shape. But the real one that's going to make this more spherical is this tessellation one, and you can only change this up to a value of five. And you can see how many polygons it adds there. If I decrease this, you can see it becomes less and less. So this only takes a value between five and one will go value like three right in the middle there, and I'm going to change this radius down to 100. Actually, I'll go 200 and the reason is, is I'm going to demonstrate one more thing as it relates to geometry brushes.

I'm going to move this brush kind of on top of our cone here. And man, I should really be a good designer and use my orthographic views, right. And what you've got here is a nice scoop of ice cream on an ice cream cone. Now let's just say that hey, you really like that ice cream cone shape and you wish you could save that out as a static mesh actor, which is something we're going to be learning more about later. So that you can drag and drop these into your level. Can you do that?

Yes, you can. And the way you do that is you select one geometric brush, like you got here, hold down Control and select the other geometric brush. And then over in the Details panel. You're going to come under your brush settings and click this little drop down arrow to show advanced. And in your advanced settings, you can choose to click on this create Static Mesh button. It'll say what would you like to name this And where would you like to save it I am going to put this in let's put it in my Starter Content shapes folder and I will label this as SM underscore ice cream and click create that static mesh.

So these are now not considered geometric brushes but one Static Mesh asset and I can now find that in my Starter Content under the shapes folder and there is my Static Mesh cone. Pretty cool so you can make your own custom shapes in Unreal using geometry and save them out as a static mesh. I'm going to delete that out because I don't really want it alright guys that is gonna do it for this one on geometry brush settings. We will see you guys in the next one