I never knew how to use the Face Normal mode in the Paint Geometry box before today, and now that I do I love it.
When you have Face Normal selected, you must alt+rightclick on a face to pick it. The disp vertices will then move along that face's normal (an axis perpendicular to it's surface). Simple as that.
Now to provide easily accessible faces to use for this, I made the Displacement Companion Cube, a 42 sided brush made with love. :blushing: It has the 6 main faces for your standard X/Y/Z movement (much easier than having to switch the dropdown list all the time!), 12 faces at 45 degrees between the 6 main ones, and 24 other faces that are near to 22.5 degrees. All this means you can plop the DCC in view of where you will be displacement editing, grab the Face Normal option, and then easily switch between a multitude of axises for displacing.
Just remember not to compile with it visible! I found it handy to put it in a visgroup with other helper objects that I always turn off before compiling.
Place the VMF in sourcesdk\bin\orangebox\bin\prefabs to use it through the prefab function.
When you have Face Normal selected, you must alt+rightclick on a face to pick it. The disp vertices will then move along that face's normal (an axis perpendicular to it's surface). Simple as that.

Now to provide easily accessible faces to use for this, I made the Displacement Companion Cube, a 42 sided brush made with love. :blushing: It has the 6 main faces for your standard X/Y/Z movement (much easier than having to switch the dropdown list all the time!), 12 faces at 45 degrees between the 6 main ones, and 24 other faces that are near to 22.5 degrees. All this means you can plop the DCC in view of where you will be displacement editing, grab the Face Normal option, and then easily switch between a multitude of axises for displacing.
Just remember not to compile with it visible! I found it handy to put it in a visgroup with other helper objects that I always turn off before compiling.
Place the VMF in sourcesdk\bin\orangebox\bin\prefabs to use it through the prefab function.

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