Best way to create a good terrain?

(Mike Nold) #1

Hello again.
I used Easygen with an imported heightmap to create a hill-and-mountain terrain, but i think i did something wrong.
i saved it as .map, but when i load it on Radiant, it’s so heavy, full of triangles i can’t even move it or copy and paste it. it takes 2 minutes to refresh the screen. The terrain has good shape but i can’t work that way, too slow.
Now i was wondering if there is a better program to generate terrains like hills and mountains OR at least if there’s a better way to set easygen to be lighter…
thanks in advance any help is very appreciated.

Mike

(Ifurita) #2

what are the overall dimensions of the terrain box and what are the dimensions of the individual triangles?

(]UBC[ McNite) #3

it’s so heavy, full of triangles

Makes me wonder whether you use the “cubic clip the camera view” button. Can you see all the terrain until the very end of the map?

And btw EasyGen is a pretty cool prog. I did an app. 8.000x11.000 units terrain with it and never had any problems. I even reimported my .map including all buildings into EasyGen to adjust the terrain to it. (I know u can do Vertex-editing, but EasyGen shows u were players can walk… that s a feature GTK is def missing.)

Selecting triangle-size of 128 units (which I recommend if you want to create some geography) my terrain.pcx (the alpha-map) is 77x89 pixels wide. So if yours is not seriously larger, I don’t think EasyGen is the source of your problems.

(DWM|Commando) #4

also if your computer isnt up to par, the gfx card, mem and processor could be slowing that down. I mapped on my 2.1 Ghz, 512 ram, no-name gfx card and in large maps(even with cubic cliping) it would be slow to work with. With my new 3.20, 1 Gb ram, ati 800x lt (my baby), i can wiz through huge maps (with cubic clipping) like nothing. Areas with large details still cause some problem, but idont have many areas with that many brushs.

(Shaderman) #5

Question: “Best way to create a good terrain?”
Answer: Do it yourself with Radiant.

Advantages:

  • Great results if you finally know how to do it :smiley:
  • You don’t have a predefined grid. You’re able to control the detail in any place of your map
  • I think it’s easier to make small changes by shearing some brushes than reloading/modifying/viewing everything in Easygen.
  • Depending on the layout of the map and detail you want: less tris --> better fps

Disadvantages:

  • Needs a lot of practice (I’m trying it the first time now myself) but depending on your claim it may be worth the effort
  • If you don’t have the practice it may take much more time than making a terrain with Easygen

Shaderman

(dark-tim) #6

*you don’t have to :slight_smile: changes can be made in radiant

(carnage) #7

Question: “Best way to create a good terrain?”
Answer: Do it yourself with Radiant.

Advantages:

  • Great results if you finally know how to do it
  • You don’t have a predefined grid. You’re able to control the detail in any place of your map
  • I think it’s easier to make small changes by shearing some brushes than reloading/modifying/viewing everything in Easygen.
  • Depending on the layout of the map and detail you want: less tris --> better fps

Disadvantages:

  • Needs a lot of practice (I’m trying it the first time now myself) but depending on your claim it may be worth the effort
  • If you don’t have the practice it may take much more time than making a terrain with Easygen

Shaderman

agreed, i have tried easygen for some time but now i always make terrin using GTK. although it takes longer i prefer bein able to contol every vertex exactly

a tip. when manualy vertex editing in radient stick to ur grid size 4. it makes it a lot easier to line up vertices. This is one problem i had with easygen that the vertices took ages to line up as i had to keep zooming in and out to get then nice adn neat on grid size one

also when working in radient work in cubes not traingles. only split to trainagles when you must its easier to edit this way

(Pytox) #8

Me and kamikazee also tried it first making with easygen, but we imported it to Gtk and made again with Gtkgensurf and that was a lot better!

(]UBC[ McNite) #9

You guys are all talking about fine-tuning. Of course that is easier and more comfortable in GTK itself.
But to get a large terrain with nice geography… get yourself a tutorial on how to make a terrain in EasyGen from a heightmap. Fastest way imo to get a terrain… takes like 5 mins.
And modifying it in the heightmap is pretty easy too, then import the heightmap again… next terrain ready.
Also you its the fastest way to get/modify the way a terrain looks using an alphamap from EasyGen which you can easily modify in EasyGen and then export again (and just the alphamap).

EasyGen is the tool for the rough work, and tbh… making terrain in GTK never can beat that.

Personally i think that most ppl don’t use EasyGen cuz they didn’t take the time to work out how it works :cool:

edit:

Depending on the layout of the map and detail you want: less tris --> better fps

Now that doesn’t have anything to do with EasyGen or Radiant. Whether u define 128 units in EasyGen for terrain triangles, or you cut your triangles in Radiant in 128 units… the difference is: EasyGen is a lot faster. The tris-count will be the very same.

(kamikazee) #10

Actually, I did it like you said: use Easygen as a tool to create good looking heightmap.
Doing the alphamap is quite handy, but my Easygen crashes when I try to import a terrain from a .map file.
I think I’m trying to use the dotproduct and alphamod way first now.

(]UBC[ McNite) #11

but my Easygen crashes when I try to import a terrain from a .map file.

You don’t import terrain from a .map-file. What would be the use?

You have the terrain, and the alphamap. The alphamap is the only thing you want to change, so why reimport the terrain? Just open the last .egn (EasyGen-file) you made your terrain from, edit the textures on the terrain, export the new alphamap.
Well… if you didn’t save your work (too bad lol), its no problem either… just open the last heightmap, create the terrain from that, apply the terrain textures again, export the alphamap… easy as cake.

The only thing that needs to stay the same is the dimensions of the terrain in X and Y. Then you can always just export the alphamap and get the new terrain look in your .bsp.

Citerum Censeo: ppl just dont take the time to read a good EasyGen tutorial and try things out a bit.

(]UBC[ McNite) #12

Let pictures speak… have a look at the screenies in this thread.

That terrain was done in EasyGen and the last 5% of fine-tuning in GTK.

(kamikazee) #13

I know how Easygen works, it’s just I’m tired of using it as it yielded strange errors here and there giving jagged terrain.
Using the heightmap works prefect though.

(DWM|Commando) #14

yea me personally find terrain work waaaay to tedious(maybe i jsut cant do it good enough) so i try not to make maps with large terrain area (thus i love city maps):stuck_out_tongue:

(MrLego) #15

I use a stand-alone version of Gensurf - then import the terrain into Radiant.

The only preview that it offers is an untextured wireframe though.

(Brevik) #16

Depends on the terrain you’re trying to build.

For Braundorf (link here) I used sock’s rockwall tutorial and alpha blending stuff to create my terrain, as it gave the best look and feel for that sort of terrain. However I don’t think that would work quite so well for “rolling hills” type terrain.

Personally I found Easygen to be an unwieldy tool and decided not to bother with it, any terrain I build in the future will be done by hand.

(Detoeni) #17

Alpha volume blending + 3d modelling app’ for makin the terrain
:notworthy:

:slight_smile:

(Shaderman) #18

Sounds interesting. Could you please give us some more information about it?

Thanks

Shaderman

(Detoeni) #19

Alpha volume blending is the stuff in sock’s tutorial.

I’m using max to make two ase models of the terrain, a flatish high poly is used for a normalmap (1024x1024) and the low poly gets exported as for radiant/game. The terrain base shader points at the normalmap, clips the ase and writes the over sized terrain lightmap (1024x1024).

Heres a test map screenshot in quake3 with “cg_thirdpersonrange 20000” (it might be more, cant rember, its a few weeks old). there is just dotproduct blending in that shot.

(Shaderman) #20

Thanks Detoeni. The screenshot looks really great, but I think it’s too much for an average mapper to learn a software like max besides all the other things you have to learn anyway :???: