Really useful advice! 

cut them into wedges, and pull the faces on each wedge outwards/inwards

Works like a charm! Thanks again. :)

Currently using only TB, so I have no way of merging the wedges back together -- does this matter much? Am I likely to run into problems when I have 12x as many brushes per cylinder? 

No, it doesn't really matter, Qbsp will cull the hidden faces anyway. I find it easier to work with less brushes whenever possible though. 

I have another question, though:

When I cut a 12-sided cylinder into wedges and extend the sides as per Scampie's advice, it works perfectly.

However, I just tried it with a 24-sided cylinder, which I created by clipping the corners of a 12-sided cylinder, as shown in czg's curve tutorial: http://www.quaketerminus.com/hosted/happymaps/curv_tut.htm (2nd image from the bottom of the page). Somehow, it doesn't seem to work: when I drag the edges outward, they don't line up.

Is there a mathematical reason for this? And is there a fix/workaround? Does anybody know? 

When I made the grid size really tiny, it all lined up. 

There is this sudden blue to brown transition:

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y80/amurad/Games/jam6a_zpssdvhzf0f.jpg

It's a blue sunlight / sunlight 2 with orange coming from lava.

The top of the rock looks hand painted in blue. There should be a smoother transition to brown. What's the best way to do it, in your opinion? 

Check the keyboard shortcuts, there is a command to build the convex hull of the current selection. The effect is the same as CSG merge. Also works with faces; that makes it easy to build connecting brushes. 

That was it. Thank you. 

Thank you.

However, I've looked through the keyboard shortcuts several times now and I cannot find anything like what you describe... 

Fyi 

What is it called exactly? I mean the shortcut I should be seeing? 

Is there anything similar to hl2 "play everywhere" flag for sound entities to make music play not as a 3D positioned sound, but as 2D sound? Does any mod support it, quoth or anything else? 

it's called "create convex hull"

Theres more on it here -

https://github.com/kduske/TrenchBroom/issues/706 

But I still don't see it. There's nothing called "Create convex hull" in my keyboard shortcuts list, or anywhere else that I can see... 

I just installed TB2 again and I remember how much I really hate it. I can't even create a brush properly, wont be using this unless a legacy brush creation option is added.

Just had a look at all shortcuts and I couldn't find it. Maybe re-open the issue in github? 

You can create brushes by activating the create brush tool. In the 2D views, its pretty much as it was in TB1 - just drag out a brush. In the 3D view, it's different for now. More powerful (you can create arbitrary shapes), but yeah, you can't just drag them out as simple as you used to be able to.

If you chime in and add issue reports, I may try and add the legacy way back in. If you just hate in silence, I can't do much ;-) 

I struggled for a good 15 minutes just then to draw a simple square. I'm a huge fan of TB but the changes to the brush tool in TB2 really turns me off. You say you can drag out a brush in the 2D view, most of my work is done in the 3d view after 2 years of mapping like that (the original vision of the editor was pure, I haven't looked back!).
I'm sure the new brush tool is really powerful in it's own way but TB2 feels like a completely different editor now. Funnily enough I still have one of the older TB2 builds somewhere, I made my first Quake 2 map using that rather than the newer version because of the brush tool.

Also, I thought I did raise this on github when you first introduced the feature. 

Do you remember where? 

Is there anything similar to hl2 "play everywhere" flag for sound entities to make music play not as a 3D positioned sound, but as 2D sound? Does any mod support it, quoth or anything else?

Use a play_sound_triggered and set the speed key to -1 for the sound to have no attenuation, so heard equally loud everywhere in the level. 

 

The sound will still be positional though. The only way around that is custom qc and playing the sound on the player entity. 

I thought I'd be smart and change some struts, pillars and fancy bits to func_detail. Then after compiling with txqbsp and loading in quake some errors showed up and everything marked func_detail was missing on map. When I loaded it up in TB1 again the parts were missing too. I then went back to a save where they were still marked func_detail and removed it. Now on compile I get: ERROR: multiple world entities on line 5135. Any idea how I can fix this or what's even wrong? Thanks 

I skipped trying to fix it and went back to an old version of the map and just updated the few things I (remember) I changed. 

Ah yes, it will still be stereo. I was told that what you can do for that is position two entities, one at '4096 4096 4096' and one at '-4096 -4096 -4096' and they'll balance each other out exactly, not tested it. Bit hacky but good if it works.

Quoth does have the ability for a sound to be played out of a specific entity - but you have to specify it by targetname, so players can't ever be the subject. This rules out, besides that music trick, Max Payne style narration mid-level... 

Say you have a very basic brush, e.g. a cube with all sides of equal length. If you then rotate it (using the editor's "rotate" tool) by 45 degrees, will it always be slightly off grid?

Conversely, if you rebuild that cube at a 45 degree angle (by starting with a new brush and clipping the sides) while keeping things on grid, will you always end up with something that is not exactly the same size as the non-rotated cube?

Because this is what it currently seems like to me, and I'm not sure what the best method here is. One option would be to rotate using the rotate tool, then with the grid size set to "1", create an on-grid brush that matches the rotated brush as closely as possible ... if you know what I mean (I'm sorry that's not explained clearly). But this seems like a messy way of doing things.

Is there a better way?