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The primary use of this tutorial will help you design your terrain around brushwork that passes through it

Patch/Mesh Vertices Splitting

The primary use of this tutorial will help you design your terrain around brushwork that passes through it. For those of us that were used to LOD terrain we could simply delete areas of it. Since we cant do that with patchs and meshes in CoD we have to be a bit more creative in the process of removing terrain.

Now when we talk about brushwork that passes through it we are talking about brushwork that creates features and/or an area that the player can pass through the terrain level.

In this simple example we are going to add a bunker that passes through terrain we have designed. The floor of the bunker is lower than the terrain so we need to remove a section of it so our player can move down and into the bunker. This tutorial does not explain how to create meshes or patches.

So we have a bunker that passes through our terrain which we have already edited. We dont want to recreate our terrain around this new bunker as it is already finished.


Well, we have the "split" command that can help us make quick work of modifing our existing terrain to fit around brushwork. Highlight the terrain mesh and hit "V". This will display the vertices on your mesh and allow you to edit them.


As you can see the rows and columns of the mesh dont line up with the edges of our brushwork. We can make this happen very quickly by moving them. Hold down shift and then left click on the row or column that you want to move and drag it till it lines up with your brush edge. Note that the first click highlights the column and by making an additional click it will switch to the row.


Now if you have been working on the grid your work will pay off as you can line up the rows and columns exactly to the edges of your brushes. Always work on the grid as much as possible. Now that we have lined up the rows and columns to the bunker we are ready to start splitting. You will notice that the entrance to the bunker is not lined but we will take care of that later.

Now highlight the row and or column to make a split and go to the drop down menu and select Patch>Split. It our case we will start with a column.


We now have two seperate meshes. Continue this process around the bunker. For every split you will get two meshs.

Next we will work on that entrance that we left for later. Align the rows and columns of the mesh to the brush edges just like we did before.


Finally perform the remaining splits on the brush edges and in doing so you will end up with terrain meshes inside the bunker that you can now delete.

Now we have our bunker in our terrain and it lines up perfectly to our brush edges. The more complex the brushwork passing through the terrain, obviously, the more work you will have to perform to your meshes but this should give you the basic concept on how you can accomplish it.


Tutorial by General Death