Making the terrain....

[Biro 0]

I'm currently working on a map and have created most of my buildings and things and are gonna make the terrain now.

I have tried some different thing but I can't sort out what's the best so I was wondering about if anyone here had a tip. What I have tried is to use a Quad Patch and edited the vertices on this one. This looks pretty good, but its easy to screw it up also. Atleast I got a pretty good patch set up, and then I wanted to put in some small hills like in the original GR maps. I created a new patch/plane over the first one and edited the vertices so it looked good and fitted into the rest of the terrain. Fixed it so I got it into GR, but it turned out that this hill was really glitchy and I could walk into it all over.

I took a look on it in igor and could see that the original hills had one blue line marking the whole hill, while mine had a lots of small cut up line, so I guess my way won't work here.

Anyone have a idea what the guys at RSE did to make this?

I know its also possible to make the terrain with "terrain" thing in Max, but I haven't checked this to good yet. Is it any good?

If there's any other ways to do this in a nice and clever way, I would really like to know...and you would get to play on a good map

Edited October 21, 2003 by Alpha_Biro

[sleeper 0]

I personally have been going with the quad patch method, it just takes a little pre-planning to make it work the way you want. You could try several quad patches just make sure that you get them snapped up tight or youll have holes.

On any floor polys try to make sure there are no floor polys underneath or above, this will give you those glitches that you are talking about. The game recognizes both ground floors and gets glitchy because of this. You can boolean out the bottom ones or simply delete the polys and snap the ones for the hills into place.

The blue lines in IGOR represent 2d collision. On hills, this is where the hills are too steep to navigate so it creates a blue line to indicate this. You can simply make a non rendered 2d collision wall to give you a nice smooth collision line in front of all of the little lines. You can detach any unused polys outside your collision wall and make them non 2d collidable if you want as well.

Keep at it, we'd like to see some good new maps.

[deleyt 0]

I use "terrain" to make my layout and my terrain looks exactly like the example on the cd.

The first advantage with "terrain" is, is that you are able to set up the basic layout of the terrain (hills etc.) by using 2D shapes (use them as your contour) and still be able to change it afterwards by simply moving the contour-objects. The terrain will adjust itself accordingly.

But, much more important, the biggest difference between "terrain" and "quadpatch" is that "quadpatch" uses a fixed set of polygons making up the mesh. So in most cases you're using more polygons then you actually need.

"Terrain" doesn't. It simply takes your contours and connects them, using only what is needed. And that means you're saving a lot of polygons.

If you need some parts to be more detailed afterwards, you can simply select the faces you want to have more detail in and "tesselate" them.

It needs a bit more practice then "qaudpatch", but I think it's worth it.

[Biro 0]

Thanks for all the info there sleeper and dee. I have also been using quad patch but find it very time taking to make it good, and there's also easy to screw it up. I made this collision wall, sleeper and it worked great exept I had some problems with getting it into the right place all the times.

Offcourse I had to try to make a terrain also as chief 3d Master Deleyt said there so I searched over at the platton for a good turtorial and found this one.

I fired up photoshop, made some conturs in white/grey/black and put it into Max and WOV! In less then 5 minutes I had a terrain that was way better then I would have made in 2 hours on the quadpatch. I really got nice hills rocks and everything with this method. Now I only need some more training to make it perfect...

[deleyt 0]

FYI: That tutorial is a different method.

That one explains displacement using heightmaps.

But if that does the trick for you, then who cares?

[harntrox 0]

3d max is ok for making terrain but there are better things out there. Bryce and TerraGen are just a few. If you are going for the look of the original game then the Terrain modifier is what they used. Just remember that if you use something (patch grid or noise modifiers) else you can apply Optimize and Smooth modifiers and reduce the poly count by up to 90% with no change in appearance.

If you plop that displacement map into Bryce (or a .3ds terrain generated by another program) you get organic height-mapped textures that can be saved out as a jpg from top view and applied to the map in 3DSM as a .rsb. You also get about 50 options to control the displacment that simply dont exist in Max or anything else I've seen. This is the biggest bang for the buck -- not only do you get total control of the polys but you get a kick-ass realistic texture mapped to it all in one shot.

Dont use Bryce for water or trees tho

--h

Edited October 22, 2003 by harntrox

[Biro 0]

Any good turtorials out there on how to make the ground with the "terrain" thing or.

I created some lines and set them in different hights, but is this the right way to do it?

[deleyt 0]

Any good turtorials out there on how to make the ground with the "terrain" thing or.

I'll see if I can make a quick one in the next coming days.

[Biro 0]

I'll see if I can make a quick one in the next coming days.