Mountains/hills

(ronboy) #1

Hello everyone. As you may know, I have started on the beach map. I need to know how to make mountains and hills. I don’t want to make the mountains and hills rectangle shaped, or they’ll look stupid. I know how to vertex edit and clip brushes, although I never like the result.

I don’t want to make the mountains out of little triangles like the creators of mp_beach did.
How can I make jagged hills and mountains? Thanks in advance.

(Eugeny) #2

Ronboy.
The photoshop and easygen is necessary to you.

(ronboy) #3

[QUOTE=Eugeny;231855]Ronboy.
The photoshop and easygen is necessary to you.[/QUOTE]

I’m not familiar with either of those. There has to be a way to make mountains without putting a thousand triangles in the map. Other mappers have used the textures from the original game to make mountains and hills.

(Eugeny) #4

easygen is a generator of landscapes.
In a photoshop you draw a black-and-white picture.
Black colour - the lowest point
White colour - the highest point
If to draw that grey that white, and then to insert in easygen the landscape on your drawing will turn out.
http://q3mapping.on.ufanet.ru/c53.html

(ronboy) #5

[QUOTE=Eugeny;231857]easygen is a generator of landscapes.
In a photoshop you draw a black-and-white picture.
Black colour - the lowest point
White colour - the highest point
If to draw that grey that white, and then to insert in easygen the landscape on your drawing will turn out.
http://q3mapping.on.ufanet.ru/c53.html[/QUOTE]

I heard Easygen is hard to use. I just want to make a mountain in Gtk Radiant, which is easier.

(Eugeny) #6

Try gensurf
http://cs-mapping.ru/programms/mapping/gensurf.zip

By the way, in a gtkradiant should be gensurf

(ronboy) #7

[QUOTE=Eugeny;231859]Try gensurf
http://cs-mapping.ru/programms/mapping/gensurf.zip

By the way, in a gtkradiant should be gensurf[/QUOTE]

Yes, I found gensurf in gtkradiant. The options under gensurf are ground surface, ceiling, wall facing 0, wall facing 90, wall facing 180, and wall facing 270. Which one do I use to make a mountain?

(Eugeny) #8

Draw in a photoshop something similar to it:


In gensurf on tab “general” in an option “game” choose “quake 3 arena”, in an option “waveform” - “from bitmap”.
Pass on tab “bitmap” and load the drawn drawing.
On tab “extents” it is possible to expose the sizes of the received map.

(ronboy) #9

[QUOTE=Eugeny;231863]Draw in a photoshop something similar to it:


In gensurf on tab “general” in an option “game” choose “quake 3 arena”, in an option “waveform” - “from bitmap”.
Pass on tab “bitmap” and load the drawn drawing.
On tab “extents” it is possible to expose the sizes of the received map.[/QUOTE]

I’m using the one in gtkradiant. It seems to be working; it divides my whole texture into nice triangles. Thanks Eugeny. :cool:
Edit: It makes the whole brush func_group. How can I select the whole texture, since it’s divided into triangles?

(BackSnip3) #10

If you have a specific texture on the floor and caulk on other you can hide caulk with filters and then select all the faces of your terrain, if not then you need to take your time and select all triangles one by one with a lot of clicking :tongue:

(Eugeny) #11

Esteem a manual on a radiant, in section controls

(ronboy) #12

Forget it. I somehow lost the .map file for the beach anyway.
I’m starting to lose my motivation to keep mapping. I find it too hard, and energy draining.
Besides, no one seems to like my maps that much.

(BackSnip3) #13

Because that’s just the begin, people help you out there, some criticism is heavy but you have to learn from it when it’s no spam, don’t leave mapping dude!
You are not obliged to make it alone, you can either concentrate on gameplay and basic design and then ask someone to make it rly good looking :D:stroggtapir:

(sd2009) #14

Although EasyGen is not that easy, it remains the best tool to create topographic landscapes with deep sees and high mountains, for me, at least. There are other techniques that are much harder and time consuming. With EasyGen you must get used to creating a suitable height map with 256 colors and load it with EasyGen and let the application create nice mountains for you. You must do some manual tuning for the EasyGen terrain shader. This is not easy, since the syntax of the q3map2 2.5.16 compiler changed since EasyGen was developed. It is not supported any more. The developer does not work on the project according to what I know. EasyGen 1.42 and q3map2 2.5.16 are not compatible. EasyGen creates a box around the terrain for you and it puts a starting point for the player in the map, if you tell it to do so. You must learn two main things:

  1. Tune the 256 color gray scale height map and
  2. Correct the terrain shader script.

If you master these two subjects, EasyGen will be a relatively easy-to-use tool. My map sp_byblosharb is an example, but it was not easy to create. I had to edit the terrain shader manually and several times until it gave me a relatively acceptable result.

Good luck with mapping.

sd2009.

(ronboy) #15

Thanks for the encouragement guys. I’m just so mad since I lost my beach .map file, and have no luck making mountains. I’m so tired of making everything rectangular and square, with an occasional other shape. Most people complain when I make most of the brushes in a map rectangular or square.
Okay, back on topic. Making mountains without Easygen…

(BackSnip3) #16

There is no secret to make mountains,brushwork…
There is another complicated way to make terrain blending, it consumes A LOT of time but then the result is epic =)
You have either this way:
Terrain blending tutorial
Or the really true way using SimonOC tutorials:
SimonOC Tutorial

(ronboy) #17

[QUOTE=BackSnip3;231947]There is no secret to make mountains,brushwork…
There is another complicated way to make terrain blending, it consumes A LOT of time but then the result is epic =)
You have either this way:
Terrain blending tutorial
Or the really true way using SimonOC tutorials:
SimonOC Tutorial[/QUOTE]

Thanks Backsnip! Those Simonoc tuts on clipping and such is useful.

(sd2009) #18

In my opinion, you are going to work 100 times more than you do with EasyGen. One error in the brushes will cost you 5 x 100 more time. I tried this technique once and discarded it. With the simonoc style of mapping, you must create every brush yourself. With EasyGen you tune a tiny bitmap and that is all. It is your choice. Either you do it the easy and fast way or you work for months on the terrain alone. It would take that much with me because my maps are large to huge.

(ronboy) #19

I have already made a jagged rock wall on one side of the beach. The other side has a concrete wall, representing the Atlantic Wall.

(BackSnip3) #20

sd2009, the way of simonoc is better because it allows you to make cliffs and stuff that are not on only one axis,like that:

2010-07-04-010755-sockter_test8.jpg1559×877 83.3 KB

2010-07-05-155453-sockter_test8.jpg1359×764 88.7 KB

2010-07-05-155506-sockter_test8.jpg1404×790 88.5 KB


The heightmap is good for a general flat with terrain with basic hills,it’s easy,but limited and easygen shaders are outdated.Plus the simonoc technique has better performance because you can choose where you put more polygon and where less.
Also I do my maps in a 3D program and with blender I export it to a map file,that’s no pain in arse at all, then I just have to texture and to place my alphamod brushes =)

Lot of time but nice results! :smiley: