How to unite two or more brushes?

Rai4u[RU]

L1: Registered
May 12, 2016
3
0
I have few brushes, but i want to make one brush from them. Grouping is only option?
 

Idolon

they/them
aa
Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
I don't believe there's any way to truly merge brushes together other than grouping. Your best bet is to use vertex edit to modify one of your brushes so that it has the shape of both of them together - just make sure you don't end up with a concave shape as a result.

I think you could merge brushes together by editing the .vmf in notepad - you'd just have to move the relevant face data from one brush into the other and delete the old brush - but that's a lot more work than your other options, and a lot more prone to failure. I'm curious to see if this would actually work, so I'll give it a shot and report back later.
 

Idolon

they/them
aa
Feb 7, 2008
2,105
6,106
Lowering your brush count is mostly useful if you're getting near the brush limit. I don't know what kind of performance impact having fewer brushes would actually have, since it's all rendered as triangles anyways, and Source will probably cull any interior faces that would be eliminated by merging brushes. It totally depends on a situational basis, but I imagine any extra frames you could squeeze out of this would be minimal - saving 4 tris is nothing when you consider that this crate is 738.