buildings and terrains

(playero) #1

Hi. I have one question and your opinion about modeling buildings:

After a few Photoshop lessons I finally finished a terrain and exported it to radiant , so my question is, my terrain is uneven like any “natural” terrain , so when I put a building or a wall , the lower part of the brush will “stick” inside of the terrain, I hope you understand what I mean. My question is, will this part (that is hidden inside of the terrain) cause any trouble later while playing the map (high fps or z-fighting,etc)?

And I was wondering if you people model your buildings with radiant or another modeling program like 3dstudio and whether you build your terrain or your buildings first!

Thanks in advance because I know you people wont let me down! :drink:

(michi.be) #2

there is no problem with putting buildings on your terrain.
But you will notice the intersections if for example two floor-brushes are sharing the same space.

(Drakir) #3

I usually do the terrain first, in that way its easier to fit the buildings nicely. I dont know anything about 3D modelling so i do all my stuff in Radiant.

(captain_cadaver) #4

i don’t know how efficient or useful it would be to model your buildings in 3dsmax. i mostly use it for props and whatnot, as far as mapping goes. though i do have a couple character models i think would be cool to see in a game somewhere, heh.

(SCDS_reyalP) #5

Yes. But you won’t be alone, splashdamage did it all over the place. :moo:
Oh, and that would be lower FPS, not higher. Which is a Bad Thing.

@michi.be :confused:

(TombardieR) #6

when you are making terrain, you should be making it with fixed ideas of where the buildings in it will be. You could either have flatshaded bits in your heightmap, for your buildings bases or use the fix points feature of gensurf, If u select a point as the top right corner of your flat bit, then hold shift and click on the bottom left corner, then u can select a square and then alter it to the hieght you want. You could just make a big brush and csg subtract the terrain, and then make the building or just hollow it out or something. There is loads of ways of doing it, it looks cool, and realistic to have a building built into the side of a hill without being on a flat plateau, but you need to have it all in mind when you create your terrain. uhm… yeah that’s my twopence

(SCDS_reyalP) #7

That is probably a bad idea. CSG subtract will make a mess out of your terrain. The cleanest way to put stuff in the terrain is to delete terrain brushes. Of course that somewhat limits the size and shape of what you put in.