Hi all,
Been a while since i played about with this, and then only with flat terrain brushes. I would like to make better terrain, but easygen seems to be no more. Can someone point me to something else please. Also, I think terrain is made from triangles? If so, could someone please give me a rough size of these so i can do it in radiant or something. I am actually trying the dot product 2 thing, so i need bumpy terrain. I also have photoshop 7.
Thanks.
you can either make your terrain by hand with normal brushes, or you can use FATE, a terrain-editing-tool, made by cooper-hawkes. he presents it here: http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13332&highlight=fate
for my current map, i made the terrain by hand but, i can tell you: it is a lot of work… 
but i think, its the best way for me to get what i want
walk_on_sky
Thanks for the reply. Will have a look at that now.
You say you do it by hand, i think this is what i need to do because otherwise i would have to base my map around the terrain and i would rather base it around the buildings i have made. Also i would rather make my map bit by bit, as opposed to starting with the terrain, then filling it.
When i first looked into this, ages ago and then gave up, i saw some examples where the terrain was just a series of triangular brushes. I could do this in Radiant but do you know roughly how big they should be?
This could come down to personal preference i guess and smaller ones although more detailed could affect FPS? Is there sort of an average?
Would you mind telling me how you did yours?
Im not planning on having loads of open terrain if that helps.
Many thanks
I usually make an 256x256(x2000?) brush and then clip it from the corners to make it a tri, then start duplicating it. I always want to have the bottom of the tris at the same attitude (yes I’m perfectionist, I want to have everything fine, even when you can’t see it unless you decompile it… :D). Select the brushes, then go to vertex editing, select the vertex you want to edit, and move ONLY UP or DOWN, NOT TO THE SIDES. Otherwise you will find yourself in troubles.
Remember for your easy fixing, use the biggest grid you can get what you want. I’d say 1 is the absolute minimum, but 8 is good. With 256x256 you won’t get a lot of tris, but the result will satisfy. I did made a terrain with fate, but then it took me more time to fix it in radiant than it would if I made the whole terrain, by hand so since then I always make them by hand. You can use the alphas and shaders that fate gives you, although I use only the alphas (for blending) and make my own shader.
Xterm1n8or
You don’t need to work in triangles - the compiler will triangulate your brushes anyhow - in fact it might be easier not to work in triangles - look up Socks rock wall tutorial and other landscape tutorials. They’re what you need.
Here is his page: http://www.simonoc.com/
Thanks for the reply guys 
mrfin - Thanks for the link:
I have actually read through this when i was making my structures. I’m not too sure what you mean though. Are you suggesting using this method to create hills/mountains/valleys etc. or turning it all horizontally (or making it horizontal in the first place) and using this as a floor. Or even both?
Sage - Thanks for the info:
I will look into that, still looking at Fate at the moment. I’ve managed to make quite a good natural looking piece of terrain with it and exported it as a map, but in Radiant each triangle seems to be made from 2 or3 bits, looks a bit of a mess, so I don’t know.
Ok, i’ve made a flat template with gtkgensurf and am trying to move the vertices. I highlight the point i want to move, change to side view so that i can move it up and down, but the point changes to the outermost one. Is there a way to lock it while i move it?
Thanks
It’s easiest to use the 3D view for that. Lock the X and Y directions so you can only move the vertices in the Z direction (up/down), then it’s easy to work in 3D view.
Could you please tell me how to lock the x, y, because i’ve looked all over and can’t find it. The manual doesn’t mention this either.
Thankyou
Then you downloaded version 0.12… try 0.13: it is more stable and produces only one third of triangles and less messy terrain.
Hi
I Have got 0.13 alpha. I uninstalled then reinstalled, made a small section of terrain 512x512 as seen in Radiant. But each triangle seems to be made from 3 bits. Is it supposed to be like this? Does it even matter?
I’ve been slighly adjusting the vertices so i can merge the pieces into 1 individual triangle, then go onto the next, it’s taking forever 
Hm you’re probably using gtkradiant 1.5 if you can’t lock the movement… In 1.4 there were 3 buttons labeled X Y and Z and if you pressed them the movement was restricted in that direction… I haven’t been able to find it in 1.5 either
hmmm… 3 “bits” should be used only in regions of high curvature…
I really have to review this code… while fate is producing terrain meshes of slightly better quality than easygen does, I am still not happy with the idea of creating brushes for a terrain mesh. now that the sdk for etqw is out, I guess I will play around with the new stuff and possibilities… maybe I will switch to obj or ase file format, in case it is possible to do alpha blending with these formats… I’ll have to dig into this. it should be at least a format that can be handled by both engines: et and etqw… well… we will see… 
Hello
What i mean by bits are brushes. 3 brushes to each triangle. Here’s a pic to show what i mean:
Is this normal? I’ve been re-aligning the vertices so that i can CSG merge them into 1 brush. Am i wasting my time?
Thanks
my technique for modelling a terrain is the following: i start with a prefab that look like this one:
2 brushes, every single one with only 4 vertices, that i produce unsing the clipper-tool. these brushes have the advantage that you can adjust and change every vertex-point like you want, it’ll never produce any errors…
i change the size of these brushes for different places in my map: when player will often see the part of the map, i take smaller brushes, and when the part is not so frequently used, i make the terrain with less detail…
you can adapt this technique also to make other things like caves or something like that when you just turn the brushes by 90 degrees…
walk_on_sky
Somewhat. The terrain FATE exports is a valid one seeing how the space below your terrain does not need to be filled.
Thanks people
I didnt think having that many brushes was good though. By doing what i did it reduced the brushes to 1/3 of what is was.
Oh well, never mind, many thanks.
um AFAIK just because you have less brushes it doesn’t mean the compiler wont split those surfaces up so you might not actually get any increase in render speed. Although I think the collision detection uses the brush data so you might be clawing back some fps there (if its a significant amount i don’t know)
the only other problem i could see further down the line if you left your brushes as there are is that you could hit the compiler brush number limit and you terrain does seem to be quite brush heavy so if you have quite a few outdoor areas then you might get problems
one solution i might offer is that you can make your terrain in FATE or whatever editor you chose then export it as a model, you should be able to strip away the caulk material quite easily. as long as you snap the vertices to a grid matching GTKradients you will probably get away with using the auto clip
Hi Carnage,
I tried to do what you suggested only i don’t think FATE exports to anything other than a .map, i can’t seem to find anything anyway.
I’ve read before that the compiler splits terrain into triangles anyway, i don’t suppose you would know how or what size? Wouldn’t it be better to make the triangles the same size as what the compiler would split it into?
Or am i just talking pants?
Many thanks
its fine for FATE to export as map since you can use GTKradient1.5 to export your map as a model and there are tools that will automaticly take of the caluked materials while you do this. check out the www.katsbits.com forums and tutorials as theris a bit of help how to do this over there
everything the game renders is in triangles so the compiler will split any surface into triangles. if you look at the vertices of your brush its fairly easy to work out where the trinalges will be. If you have a side of a brush with three vertices it will become on triangle. if you have 4 vertices it will be split into 2 triangles
when plauing your map type /r_showtris 1 into the console and you should get a better idea