Constructor Guide Part 2: Basic Building and Polishing

Welcome back to the Constructor guide. If you’ve followed from the very beginning, you should have an idea of what’s in front of you in the interface, and you should have all the textures installed and ready to use.

This part of the guide will cover movement, basic building and texturing, and exporting.

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Moving around is easy to get comfortable with given its simplicity and similarities to movement in Marble Blast.

In the 2D views, hold right click and drag your mouse to move around. In the 3D perspective, hold right click and use the WASD keys to fly around, and use your mouse to move the camera around. You can also hold shift to move faster, and like mentioned in the interface, you can change the speed of your movement in the Preferences tab in the Properties window.

The scroll wheel zooms you in and out in every view. If you scroll in far enough in the 3D perspective and move back away from the center, you’ll see less of the grid than if you were zoomed in farther. I find it the most useful to see as little as the grid as I can in the 3D perspective, but it’s your preference.

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Now it’s time to start for real! First, select a texture to use. I find that using a trim texture (most commonly called edge_white2) is usually the best way to begin, so go up to the top left and press the Build Cube button.


The Properties window has automatically gone to the Tool tab, which you’ll use all the time. Start by setting the size of the brush to 2x2x2, and setting the center of the brush to 0, 0, and 0. Also make sure that the U and V scale in the Texturing section is 1 and 1. To finalize the cube, hit either the Make button or the Build Cube button again.

Select Faces mode (either by clicking the button or pressing 2), and resize the brush to be 16 edge tiles long, 8 edge tiles across, and 1 edge tile high. Resizing a brush in Faces mode is as simple as selecting a face, and dragging it in or out using the arrows on the axis. No huge deal if your brush is off-center in any way, but if you care about neatness, it’s good to have one of the four corner (vertical) edges on 0, 0, 0, otherwise called the origin. Move the brush by selecting Brushes mode and using the axis.


For the sake of being neat, it’s not a bad idea to position the brush right below the grid. This is when you can use the 2D view to tell when the brush is in the right place. A good thing to keep in mind is no matter how far you zoom in or out on any of the 2D views, you will always see the axis that intersects with the origin.


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This isn’t quite what we want our platform to look like, so let’s work on changing that.

Going back to the Materials window, first select a floor tile texture (I’m using grid_cool2), which is what you’re used to rolling on when you’re playing. Contrary to last time, instead of hitting Browse, use the drop-down menus for a more efficient process. The top one is for the texture album, which is already set to Gold from earlier, and the bottom one is for the textures themselves. Open the drop-down menu by clicking on it, and selecting the texture you want to use. Make sure you’re still in Faces mode when you’re applying the texture, or you’ll change the look of the entire brush. Hit the apply button, and watch the brush immediately look a bit more like a normal platform!


The floor is a bit bigger than what we want it to be though. Fortunately, when you have a face selected, texturing options should show up in the Properties window in the Object tab.

Set the scale to 0.5x0.5, which is what almost all floor tiles should look like. If your texture still doesn’t look quite right, use the up and right justify arrows to align the textures.


Deselect the face by clicking in empty space in any of the viewports. For the sake of being neat again, you can choose to texture the bottom of the brush as well. Oftentimes I use a wall texture (using pattern_cool2 here) or the same floor tile texture I used on top, and I usually scale to 1x1.


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Something good to keep in mind are what the best scales to use for textures are. Some of these are subject to personal taste, but the most important ones are the floor tiles and trim because it’s what should be used to most easily match the normal look in-game. Values apply for both X and Y scales.


Floor Tiles: 0.5
Frictions: 0.5
Trim: 1
Walls and Wall Tiles: 1

Something that’s good to keep in mind that the length of 4 edge tiles is equal to the length of 1 floor tile. Textures that are variants of trim or walls (for instance) should usually be matched to fit the scales given above.

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The most important thing to do with any project is to save every once in a while. It’s best to save as a .csx file because that will give you the more favorable experience when it comes to exporting. If you’re a macOS user and you plan to want to have moving platforms in your level, save as a .map file. This is explained in more detail in part 3.

Save the level into the right folder for whichever textures you used; because I used Gold textures for the guide, I save into the Gold folder.


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Cool, that’s a good start, but no reason to stop there! Say you want to have this brush turn a corner, or go up as a ramp, whatever. That can’t be done with a single brush, so go to Brushes mode for duplicating the brush. You can either use traditional copy and paste methods (Ctrl/Cmd C+V), which will place the new duplicate in the exact same position as the original, or you can hold Shift and click-drag on any of the three axis as a slightly faster method, which is what is shown above.


This new duplicate will be turned into a ramp. Select the side face on the end of the brush and move it on the Z axis to make a slope. I moved it up 8 trim (the equivalent to 2 floor tiles) for this guide.


So, the sides of the ramp could definitely look better, but you can come back to that later if you want to get right into finishing and exporting your level. Part 4 will teach you how to skew textures and make the sides look more aligned with the sloped platform.

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A couple more things to quickly explain before you have everything you’ll need to know as you get comfortable with the very basics of building.

Platforms are very commonly surrounded by trim to give them a much more polished look. To start, duplicate your platform using the Shift-and-drag method, resize the platform to be one trim wide, and make sure all six sides of the brush are set to the trim texture, which can most efficiently be done by applying the trim texture when you are in Brushes mode. Be sure to set the scales of all the faces (at least the ones you can see!) to 1x1, and if you need to, align everything with the justify arrows. Keep lining everything with trim all the way to the end of the slope.


You can duplicate more than one brush at a time, simply by having multiple brushes selected before duplicating normally. If you use the three brushes that make up the ramp to continue the path that’s starting to form, you can make the new part of the platform flat again by selecting all of the faces on the end and dragging them down.


That’s pretty much everything that’s important to cover for now. You have all the knowledge you’ll need before you export your level. If you’re feeling up for it, keep building for a little while and see what you can create with your new skills! Take some time to practice duplicating and moving faces around to make more interesting shapes, and eventually it’ll become second nature before you realize it.

This last set of pictures below shows the progression of the rest of the level I made for this part of the guide, which will be what I export and put into the game. Next, it’s time to put your level into Marble Blast.


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Previous Part: Constructor's Interface and Setting Up

Next Part: Exporting and Loading Your Interior