Tips on brush creation?

Hey murph. What im finding hard about adjusting to unrealED is brush creation. It takes too long to specify a brush size then build it. This can become a pain if the grid units between some brushes are not commonly used measurements (256, 512 ect). Is there a way to create brushes in the viewports? or some other way thats easier?
another thing is how do you recommend i create arches ect, should i build them in the 2d shape editor? its also quite difficult to use that too.

Thanks mate, if you have any other helpful tips that would speed things up it would be great if you could share them

The community shares the consens that external 3d modeling programs are the preferred way to create StaticMeshes. Smoothing Groups for smoother lighting, baking lightmaps directly into the texture for very fine shadows, much better uv mapping features, more control over triangulization, easier to get rid of unneeded faces and probably a whole slew of other reasons. Blender is a free program that is recommended by many.

You still need brushes for the room layout though. Are you always trying to put in the correct values for the lengths of the sides of your cubes or the heights of your cylinders? Just put in any 2 powered value that is at least twice as big as the size your grid is set to so it ends up on the grid. Any further adjustments can easily be made via Vertex Editing and/or Brush Clipping. It must be weeks ago when I entered any values in the cube brush creator thingy. I just place the default one and Vertex Edit it into shape.
If you want to go with values you can hold down shift and then draw a line between two points in a 2d-viewport with your middle-mouse button and it will show you the distance between the two points.
Beware that if you meassure distances between points that aren't on a horizontal or vertical line the UnrealEd will round the distance, which makes it almost useless for 3d editing. It's still helpful to see how far players can jump or how far you have to set your fog and the like.

ive noticed in several maps, mostly RO that some debris/obstacles perfectly fit their environment, such a room with rubble in it. Do the mappers just create the brushes, then convert it to a static mesh? is this used a lot with unreal mapping? I use 3ds max 9, is it possible to create geometry in there then export it to unrealED to be used as bsp brushes?

For the most part it makes no sense to create something in 3ds max and use it as a brush because brushes should only be used for geometry that is so simple that you can just skip the middle-ware and create it directly in UnrealEd. Theoretically it is of course possible. Just right-click your placed StaticMesh and chose Convert to Brush and the builder brush will take its shape. If you add or subtract it afterwards it will even use the same texturing as the StaticMesh had.

If debris etc. perfectly fits that is most likely because it just just sticks into the geometry a little but as a player you can't see that. StaticMeshes cannot cause bsp-errors so it does no harm if they stick into stuff a little.

so do they just convert the brushes they dont want to affect bsp into a static mesh inside the actual editor?

I can't tell without an example or a screenshot, but maybe. It is possible to do it and it's better to convert small details to StaticMesh than to leave it as a brush (better performance, less bsp-errors). It would be even better to create them in an external program but stuff like small debris pieces or a piece of metal sticking out somewhere doesn't need to look perfectly lit so making those kinds of StaticMeshes in the UnrealEd makes sense.

You can just open the map in the SDK (=UnrealEd) and take a look at how it's done. Open steam, go to tools and download & install the Red Orchestra SDK, if you haven't already.

EDIT: Even though it is by no means the preferred method, I could post a tutorial about how to convert brushes to StaticMesh. Expect it to be up tomorrow evening.

ah cool , i've actually done it before but it would still help other people so go ahead !

Done

excellent