The Floor Lofter
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Tomasz 'Millennium' Jachimczak
tomasz@planetunreal.com

The Floor Lofer
The floor lofter can make a great difference to your levels. It is actually a great little device that I have not used to much before, but the other night, I started to fiddle with it and managed to get some terrific results from it, and I have had quite a few questions about natural levels of late, so what better way to show you how to do them, then with a good explanation of the Floor Lofter.

The floor lofter can be accessed by a menu from the "window" option, and it opens a new little window. When you open the window, you will see a "box like" frame of a brush, with five dots on the top of it. There are a few other things here as well, but these will be explained in order in a few moments. You will see five dots. Each of those spots represents a different level that can be changed to suit your needs. The best way to explain how it woks is to pretend that the whole thing is a cake for a llittle while.You will be cutting the cake into a few seperate slices. The first bit that you are looking at is the end of the cake side on. You can change the ehight of the "topping" here by miving the dots up and down. When you have created the first layer of the cake then you can start to move on to the second section of the cake. At the top of the screen you will see a section that says 1 of 5. and there will be a few arrows next to that. Click on the right arrow and you will see it click over to 2 of 5. You will find that the dots have moved to the middle again. To start making your second section of the brush, move your dots up and down again, and you will have created the second section of the brush. Keep doing this until you have got all of the parts (There are five in total) and click on the "create" button. You will see the new screen close, and your builder brush will be in the shape of your new creation. The brush will be in proper 3D and will be able to be used just like any other brush in the editor.

Note : You can create a brush that is much taller then the normal one that it will auto matically create by dragging the bottom of the brush down, and you can actually drag the dots up over the limit of the screen that appears. You are also able to create brushes that will match one another by writing down the vectors that the dots take. You can find these out by letting the mouse hover over each one. To make a longer rbush, simply make sure that the 5th line of you first shape and the 1st line of your second brush are set to the same numbers. The same can de done if you want to have a brush (or landscape) that is wider then the standard that the brush is. You can actually change the size of the brush that is created, and you can then scale the brush up and down when you take it back into the editor, although if you scale it up, then you will obvisouly lose the detail in it, so you might have to do a little math to make the brushes align properly when you get them back into the editor.

This should about wrap it up here, although as I said, I have really only used it in the last few days, if there is something here that I have not explained, then please write to me, and I will try to make things a little clearer, or if you want to add to this tutorial, then please feel free to do so. 
