Converting brushes to static meshes or volumes

As level designers, we will often greybox our levels to playtest and make sure that a level is fun and works correctly. Once we get to a point where the level is not going to change very much, we give our environment artists a model with the environment and then they can go in and make everything pretty with complex meshes or create pieces for us to build it out modularly. The first thing we will be doing in this recipe is creating the mesh that we can give to our artists. The second thing we will be learning is how to convert brushes into volumes. As you may be aware, the high-poly meshes that our environment artists would create could be very computationally expensive to check against collision with other objects at runtime. A trick that we will often use is to convert the brushes into a blocking volume that will still have the collision as we've been using and then filling the world with meshes to look the best it can.

In addition, you...