The first part for making a patch, involves creating a brush. Select the brush, and then, based on how you want to move on, you do either of these:

It's important to note, that the side of your brush that is displayed in the 2d-view, is the side that will turn itself into a patch. This applies to Curve & Terrain patches. You can always rotate the patches if they're not oriented correctly.

Marked with 1, a simple curve patch is made when you want fine curves. An archway, a nice bend around a corner, or anything you can think of, a curve patch can be used to.


Marked with 2, a simple terrain patch is made when you want to work with terrain, or work with blends. Terrain with different levels of elevation on different parts of the patch, blending out a texture to add more detailing, and more.


Marked with 3, primitives are mostly cylinders, but also offer for bevels, and bevel-caps. Water tanks, pillars, pipes, anything that might require some round parts.


Moving & Editing Patches

If your patch is positioned correctly, and/or you want to flip which side of the patch is displaying a texture, CTRL + I will alternate inbetween both sides.

To enter vert-editing mode, simply hit V when a patch is selected.

To add more verts, select two verts on the same axis of the patch, and press CTRL + A

To select a vert on your patch, simply drag-select with the mouse. When you're in vert-editing mode, Radiant will switch to a drag tool, so just drag your mouse over the verts you want to select. Re-selecting an already selected vert will deselect it. It's worth noting that when you try to select more verts, the previously selected verts will be deselected. To prevent this, simply hold down CTRL while you select your verts.

When you want to move a vert, you want to hold down ALT, and use Right Mouse Button to drag the verts. Switching between all 3 view in the 2d view, you can easily move it in all directions; x,y & z.

If a vert is not in place, CTRL + G will move the vert into it's closest location on the grid, so depending on how fine tuned you have the grid at the time, the movement for the verts may change.

So, you know the basics of working with patches, and you want to add blends. Blends is a nice way to add more detail to a plain texture, giving it a more "dirty" look, if you so choose.
As you can see in this image, a blend has been used to make the edges of the walkway seem more "dirty", as it's next to a grassy area.



A blend is essentially a terrain patch, with a _blend texture on it. (This means any texture that is set to be a blend texture. Generally they have _blend at the end of their name).

But applying the texture isn't all! We still need to actually blend out the texture, whish essentially means making it fade. Changing it's transparency allows us to control what parts of the patch will, and which will not show the texture, and in what degree.

Firstly, create a Terrain Patch. Select your patch, and apply a _Blend texture to it. These can be found by looking at a texture's name. Easiest way to find _blend textures is to open the texture-search, and put in "_blend".


Here is an example of how you can use blending to produce the feeling of a texture being "overgrown":

Firstly, I start off with having my base, a brush textured with "berlin_floors_concrete_tile5". Note that this isn't a blend texture, as it's not the texture we'll be blending.

Then, I create a patch, 10x10 above my brush, and apply a _Blend texture to it, "okinawa_terrain_grass_densedmoss_drk_blend"



It's worth noting, that the blend texture can lay right ontop of the brush. It might flicker in Radiant, but ingame it'll look good. It's when you have more than 1 blend you need to have them atleast .25 units above eachother, to not get an error. For demonstration, I put the blend .25 above, so its easier to see.

moving on, I made a 10x10 patch, which means there is a total of 100 verts for me to change upon. I can move these verts around if I choose, but for this example, they can stay right in place.

Selecting a few verts, I press G to open up "gVertex Color/Alpha Editing.


Now I can choose how transparent I want my selected verts to become. For my sake, I'll take it to completely transparent, 0. Dragging the Alpha Value to 0, I then make sure to check off Alpha, before I hit apply.

As you see, the texture slowly fades into the verts that are now invisible, creating a nice effect that looks smooth.



The result? A nice transition from the two textures. Add in some foliage, lighting and maybe a few models, and you've got yourself a nicely detailed area!

Do you have anything you wish to comment, or anything you want me to add? Send me a PM, or comment here.
I'll be adding more tutorials as I have the time.