- Edited by AEon 2009, v1.3.
Welcome to the Quake3World LEM GTKradiant Tips...
- Here you will find a list of useful key-shortcut tips for GTKradiant that even after years of usage may have been overlooked or not used enough to actually take advantage of them. Feel free to add your own personal "nifty" GTKradiant usage tips. Other Q3A mapping related tips are also presented.
Note: TOC Links will *only* skip to posts = main topics, not to the actual sub topics. A limitation of phpBB, alas. (***TODO)
Table of Contents
- Practical Shortcut Usage Examples
- ... Selecting More of the Same - Textures, Entities, Key/Value pairs.
... Quick Clipping
... "Fluid" 2D-Zoom
... Copy vs. Clone in Group Entities
... Find & Remove 0x0x0u³ Brushes
... Quick Shader Code Look-Up
... Define Your Own Editor Shortcuts
... Finding Uncaulked Detail Brush Faces More Easily
Convenient Shortcuts- ... The Middle Mouse Button
... Texture Alignment / Manipulation Keys
... Patch Mesh Shortcuts
... Miscellaneous Editor Shortcuts
Reference Links (direct links)- ... Shortcut List for Q3R - Q3Radiant Editor Manual, useful for GTKradiant.
... Look up shortcuts in GTKradiant via Help menu, Shortcuts List.
- ... Selecting More of the Same - Textures, Entities, Key/Value pairs.
Practical Shortcut Usage Examples
Selecting More of the Same (AEon)
- GTKradiant (v1.2.13) can really help when trying to find rarely used textures (e.g. to remove them completely from the map), or light sources with a specific color (e.g. to recolor the lights). You basically just select what you want to find, and then press Shift+A.
- Textures: Select a texture face then Shift+A, this will select all brushes/patches with that texture on them. Useful to find obscure (hidden in geometry) textures, or simply to check how often and were the texture was used.
Tip: Select a skybox texture, use Shift+A, then hit the H-key to hide all the sky related brushes for easier editing. - Entities: Select an entity - e.g. ammo, weapon, health, armor, trigger brush, playerclip, or light; via Shift+A show all those entities. Useful to quickly check where a certain type of ammo was placed in the map, or to globally work on all lights.
Note: If the Key/Value fields in the Entities window (N-key) are set to some value, the above will *not* work! Should you have problems with "finding" the other entities of the selected type, clear (delete the chars in) the Key/Value fields. - Key/Value: If you are trying to find entities with a specific Key/Value pair, simply open the Entities window (N-key), and select the data pair from the above list, or manually enter them, then hit Shift+A.
Tip: Select a colored light entity, select its _color Key/Value pair, then click outside the Entities window, and press Shift+A, to select all light entities with exactly that color. *Very* useful when trying to recolor many light sources. Note this also works well for the light intensity.
- Textures: Select a texture face then Shift+A, this will select all brushes/patches with that texture on them. Useful to find obscure (hidden in geometry) textures, or simply to check how often and were the texture was used.
Quick Clipping (AEon)
- While holding the Ctrl-key, do a RMB-click (Right Mouse Button) to place the Clipper points without having to Toggle Clipper via X-key.
"Fluid" 2D-Zoom (AEon)
- While holding the Shift-key, do a RMB-drag (up/down movement) to zoom in/out in the current 2D view. Note: The Mouse-Wheel or the Del and Ins keys will do the same.
Copy vs. Clone in Group Entities (Tabun)
- It is practical how you can control the duplication of brushes that are part of a group entity (func_group):
- Use Copy & Paste (Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V) to create a new brushes that form a new entity but with identical properties.
- Use Clone (Space-key) to create the new brushes that are are also part of the *old* entity.
Find & Remove 0x0x0u³ Brushes (neoplan)
- To find out if there are 0x0x0u³ (dimensionless) brushes in your map, that for obvious reasons cannot be selected directly, try this:
Press the I-key (Invert Selection) to then deselect everything by making a frame over the whole brushwork with Shift+LMB. These ghost brushes will stay selected and you can delete them.
***AEon: Does not work in the 2D views (the frame dragging) using v1.4. Please double-check this neoplan. Details? Editor version?
Quick Shader Code Look-Up (Bliccer)
- When you open the Textures window (via T-key) you can then Shift+LMB click any of the white bordered images to open up the shader file's code. This is helpful to quickly look up what the shader actually does.
Tip: Should this not work for you try to set Edit menu, Preferences, Other, Misc, Use win32 file association....
Define Your Own Editor Shortcuts (obsidian)
- Radiant has a shortcut file that it reads on startup. For GTKradiant 1.5.0 this is the shortcuts.ini file located in
- Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\RadiantSettings\1.5.0\q3.game\
***AEon: One might want to mention that this file also exists for the older versions of GTKradiant.
Finding Uncaulked Detail Brush Faces More Easily (AEon)
- When texturing many detail brushes, e.g. creating rocks or other detail work - even if you start off with caulked brushes, and you think you only textured the visible faces - you may still be missing (i.e. those accidentally textured via Clipper tool or accidentally selecting the whole brush when texturing) uncaulked brush faces... since the compiler does not remove such faces, you will see them in-game. Bad!
One way to remove those uncaulked detail brushes is to simply select them, caulk the complete brush to then re-texture only the visible faces. Works well enough, unless you did a lot of texture alignment.
Tip: Turn on the View menu, Filter, Caulk by pressing Alt+6. This will hide all the caulk brush faces, leaving only those uncaulked textures. It should then be relatively easy to caulk those as well.
Convenient Shortcuts
The Middle Mouse Button ($NulL, AEon):
- 2D View:
- MMB
Rotate the camera to point towards mouse location. - Ctrl+MMB
Place the camera at the mouse's location. Very useful to quickly navigate large maps. - Ctrl+Alt+MMB
Define the location of the Z-"Marker" Icon in XY-view. To help orientation the Z-Window shows the floor, ceiling and other brushes - the brush layers in color - at the location of the Z-Icon, this helps with brush placement.
- MMB
- 3D View:
- MMB
Grab pointed at texture, and replace/cover any selected brush face(s), selected brush(es) or selected patch(es) with it. - Ctrl+MMB
Apply selected (current) texture to a complete brush. - Shift+MMB
Apply selected texture to a single brush face - Maintaining the face's previous scale and rotation settings.
***AEon: Does not work for v1.2.13 or v1.4, Q3R only? - Ctrl+Shift+MMB
Apply selected texture to a single brush face - Copying the texture projection from the selected texture.
Also used to Select a texture on brush face!
***AEon: $NulL your key shortcuts don't work the way you describe them for me. - MMB
Texture Alignment / Manipulation Keys (AEon, Pat Howard):
- Select a texture face via Ctrl+Shift+LMB in Camera view, then use:
- Shift+Cursor
Shift texture. - Shift+PgUp/PgDn
Rotate texture. - Ctrl+N
Natural texture alignment for patches. - Ctrl+Shift+N
Cycle Cap Texture to properly align textures on (patch) caps. - Shift+B
Fit texture. - Ctrl+Cursor
Scale texture.
- Shift+Cursor
Patch Mesh Shortcuts (Pat Howard):
- Select a patch mesh via Shift+LMB, then use:
- V-key
Show Vertices. - B-key
Bend patch. - Shift+P
Create simpl patch mesh using the dimenstions of the currently selected brush. - Shift+S
Patch Properties window. - Ctrl+G
Snap highlit (blue) vertices to grid. - Ctrl+I
Invert patch, e.g. texture *inside* of cylinder. - Ctrl+N
Natural texture alignment for patches. - Ctrl+Shift+N
Cycle Cap Texture to properly align textures on (patch) caps. - Ctrl+T
Thicken window.
- V-key
Miscellaneous Editor Shortcuts (Pat Howard):
- Other useful shortcuts:
- Alt+Cursor
Nudge selected entities by currently set amount of grid units. - 1-key to 9-key
Set the current grid size from 1u to 256u, default 8u. - [ -key / ] -key
Down/up grid size by factor of 2. - Ctrl+Alt+LMB
Select func_group. - H-key / Shift+H
Temporarily Hide/Unhide currently selected entities. For a complete list of filter keys see the View menu, Filter. - Ctrl-Alt-E
Select one brush of a func_group, then use the shortcut to select all the brushes of that group (v1.5 only; phantazm11). Use Ctrl-Alt-LMB to select a complete group in the older editor versions.
- Alt+Cursor
Preferences 