Making smooth mountains as Borders

(TWIXMIX) #1

I want to make mountains like in the bg of this screen

how would i do that

(DAbell) #2

I would imagine that terrain was made using Easygen its a additional program but it is fairly easy to use, you create a grey scale image in a paint package with white being high and black being low. then Easygen uses this as a template for the landscape.

Easygen also gives you the ability to paint your textures onto the surfaces there are lots of tutorials and help available through the search on this forum as i found.

Get Easygen Here

http://digilander.libero.it/ilbanca/files_easygen.htm

Good Luck

(Oxygen - o2) #3

Also if you wana get things a little advanced my good freind you could try gensurf (see marko for more info!)

(joop sloop) #4

Or if you want to take the big plunge right away, read the topic about terrain alpha blending which can give you some stunnig results…

(redfella) #5

Actually, the hills in that screenshot are REALLY smooth… to get that kinda smoothness you will have to use a low tris division. But, be forewarned, using a low tris division may adversly affect your frame rates. If your using Easygen, I recommend using no lower then 64 unit divisions. However, 128 unit division is recommended.

:slight_smile:

(Irrelevant) #6

It could be phong…

(gerby) #7

I think he meant the shape was smooth (Ie the silhouettes) as opposed to the shading .

It could just be a sky box, dunno - is that the latest transmitter release? If so, I dunno which method they use.
For a sky box you could try the stunning terragen program, its beeeeeeyoooooootiful.

(Machine for to kill) #8

Or if you really want to go crazy, you could try drawing them with patches. That would give super duper smooth results, with giant spikes in triangles. His terrain is merely phong shading. There’s nothing special about the silhouette. As redfella said he’s probably used 128 or lower division to get higher precission. Brushwork like that is not difficult to create once you have a handle on things. Or he could’ve made the mountains out of models. Then exported everything.

There’s a million triks to doing stuff in radiant. Just keep learning and eventually you’ll figure stuff out.

(Irrelevant) #9

Another trick I know for complex low-poly skyboxen:

Make your mountains or whatever in a raytracer (or other 3d app), get pics looking along each axis in both directions (left, right, forwards, backwards, up, down), and put them in as the nearbox for a sky.

Or if the nearbox doesn’t work (the manual says it’s untested) you could put them on the inside of a hollow cube with a props_skyprotal in the middle.

This means that you only have 12 tris (well, the compiler may split it into more) for an arbitrarily detailed skybox, but the raytraced images need to be quite high resolution to avoid the pixels being too obvoius.