Hi all.
My ET map is set on a long hill with a road going zig-zag upwards. Does anyone know of a technique which can produce a height map like that? I guess what I need is like a worm looking thing which gets brighter and brighter towards one end. Linear gradients are great for straight hill roads, but don’t do much for bends.
Or forget all about easygen and make the terrain by hand 
Which Is what I’m doing with my map. look for sock’s rock tutorial and adapt that for terrain making. and look up terrain alpha blending for a goodlooking shader technique.
isnt that gonna take u AGES?? Maybe you could combine both methods i.e make an sime terrain map and then tweak it in the game, im not sure…
you can make terrain from scratch with easygen also… it doesnt take a long time as there are modifiers in easygen that can get the terrain roughed in like you want or close, and then just edit the verts
What I did for making roads in my terrain went something like this:
When designing my heightmap, I made notes of where the roads (or, more specifically, where the spline paths for vehicles) would need to be. Having terrain that changes elevations really quickly creates a big problem when you’re trying to make your vehicle actually keep all 4 wheels (or whatever) on the ground.
Once I knew where my roads needed to be, I created the road through the terrain, making i about 3-4 pixels wide the whole way. I used the color representing the lowest height on the road for this first pass.
Next, I just went and gradually increased/decreased the height as necessary throughout the road I had made, making sure that I made mini gradients when adding hills/depressions to make sure the height change wasn’t soo sudden to cause problems.
I then went and fixed the terrain pixels around my roads by adding some median colours between the road itself and its surrounding terrain. This was done to make the terrain seem more natural, and not like the road is the product of a rock cut. If that’s the look you’re going for, though, then leave it. Heh.
One thing to note is that 4 pixels might be too wide for your needs/abilities (somtimes you only have so many pixels to play with in an area), so a good measure is to make a small patch of this road, and toss any models you will but putting onto this road onto it in Radiant. That should help you guage the width necessary for your roads. IF you don’t need and vehicles to go on it, of course, then you don’t really have to worry about making soft hills/depressions so much, since the players move a little better than vehicles do.
Also, I’m one of those people who couldn’t figure out how to make a 300x300 image make a map that wasn’t ridiculously large. Instead, I figured out how much 1 pixel equated to in size in Radiant, and made a 28x40 (or something to that extent) heightmap accordingly.
Anyway, as Joop Sloop mentioned, you can just do the terrain by hand if you want. I’d imagine that would take forever, though.
Finally, another thing you want to avoid is modifying your terrain in Radiant where possible. You can only really pull terrain up or down to a certain degree before you get sparklies. And nobody wants sparklies.
yeah i just started lookin in more detail at terrain and im gettin a bit lost…maybe u can help. Iv looked at the sock terrain stuff but im havin a few difficulties gettin it to work. Iv made the shader and a hill to test with but im not sure how 2 put the textures on it so it works, iv read thru socks thread but im still a bit confused. As uv already done it (Mad Maximus) maybe u cld do a brief run through of what to do? It would be much appreciated!
actually, i never quite got it going 100%, t abandoned the testing to get back on with my mapping and meant to come back to it, basicly the main thing you have to probably play with is your alpha channels in your terrain textures, as rgoer said they have to be 85 to 95% bright, and the best way to do this is to use your photoshop/paintshop/gimp or whatever you have at your disposal to ajust these things, you keep your et windowed and you can switch back and forth ( alt-tab) between the two, ajust your textures as needed, save them and switch back to et and restart your map, and you will see the changes. The shaders that were posted in that thread do work, as they did work for me, but it was the textures i was using. i used some standard ones from et that had no alpha channel and had to add the alpha’s to them, my tests were blending but just not in the proper places i expected them to. i had to ajust my dotproduct2 falloff’s but never got back to it at that time, as i went back to my wip. but like i said, i will come back to that terrain style to test more until i have it, as it is a really nice way to do terrain, in fact i like the way that terrain looks as compared to the old style of et terrain. I know what i just posted may not have been much help, as it has been mentioned in that thread, but iu’d go back there
http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=5882&highlight=terrain+sock
and post a question there as to more detail or what problem your having, it will bump the topic back up and hopefully you can get a better response, but if it’s your intent to have terrain like that, don’t give up trying, you can do it. I just didnt have a need for it right now so i didn’t push myself further with it at that time. it was something that was posted that looked real amazing and i stopped whatever i was doing to dabble in it for a bit, so dabble with it yourself and keep dabbling til it’s done =)
Iv made some progress since I last posted and i kinda got it working. Im also ‘dabbling’ with it at the mo as im after getting more freedom than whats available usin height maps, il play around with these settings and see what happens! cheers.
no prob, practice makes perfect =)
i never liked to make rivers and such with the old terrain as it just never looked decent enough… passable, but that’s all. that new style of terrain can do wonders. and ive never tried to use hightmaps with the old terrain, well… once i did… but i prefer to manually make my terrain in easygen with the modifiers and hand work… to me its quicker and get’s the results im actually looking for.
yeah i use a combined method of both, btw do you know if you have to use a 33, 33 map because iv been workin 63,63 and it dosnt seem to be causin ne problems. Iv been around the forum and there seems to be mixed views
since we’re on the subject :), can someone tell me a method of creating a personalized terrain to what I want withought starting by scratch in photoshop and using different shades of grey and then saving it as a bmp? THAT"S QUITE THE PAIN IN THE ASS! heh, if there is a much easier way, and since I’m ignorant toward ths ubject, hopefully there is :), thanks guys. Looking at that sock guys post has caused me to realize how much of a noob I still am, I funno if I’m gonna go through with this mapping stuff, it just takes too much it seems and I don’t think I’ll be able to make a decent one :\
Thanks all for your comments. It really is a tricky subject! :drink:
I think I’m going to try using Sock’s new method of making terrain. It seems to add a lot more flexibility to terrain design since you can move away from the fixed size triangle approach. Should be good for making my curvy hilly road equal width around corners and the like.
I’ve also been thinking that maybe combining the new method with the old method might be an option as well. For example, use the new method to make the near vertical cliff faces, and then add a semi-flat top to the cliff using the old method.
Does anyone know if you can move the vertex points of a old method terrain around in X,Y directions while keeping the alphamap working?