Area brushes are created by clicking Area near the bottom of the DromEd window (when Create is selected). You can then create area brushes by clicking and dragging in the panes (top is usually preferable).
An area brush is a tool used to filter out some parts of the level (or to quickly multibrush a group of brushes in a single place, such as a doorframe or bookcase created from terrain brushes). Their main purpose is to make it easier to see what you are doing in the editor, and to allow fast portalisations limited to specific regions. There are three levels of filtering (ignoring the options under Filter which relate to specific brush types) -
- All area brushes are inactive, no area brushes exist, or filtering is off: all brushes are visible and will be portalised.
- Filtering is on and some area brushes are active: only brushes fully or partially within an active area brush are shown/portalised.
- Filtering is on and there is an area brush set to Me Only: only brushes fully or partially within that area brush are shown/portalised (regardless of which area brushes are active).
The buttons -
- Show Hot/Show All: this turns filtering on/off. Note that filtering is on if the button reads Show All, and off if the button reads Show Hot.
- Activate/DeActivate: sets the Activated/DeActivated status of the selected area brush.
- Me Only/Not Me Only: sets the selected area brush as the current MeOnly-ed area brush (unsetting the current MeOnly-ed area brush if there is one), or unsets it.
- multi-brush-me: multibrushes everything (except other area brushes) fully or partially within the currently selected area brush.
- Name: allows you to name the currently selected area brush. Useful with Search.
- Search: allows you to select an area brush by name from a list (area brushes without a name will not be listed).
- Lo/Hi: These allow you to activate a specific range of (non-area) brushes based on their Time value. All non-area brushes with Lo ≤ Time ≤ Hi will be active, any others will not. Note that a Hi value of zero will be considered to be greater than any Time value. Unlike Activate and Me Only, this will work even if filtering is off.