question about terrain mainly for de3coy

(Kic) #1

HI,
can someone tell me How to make terrain to look good and very natural.
If I make terrain by hand, How to make 2 textures ( for example rock and grass)
to join , look natural ( as I can do in easygen) ( not visible texture triangles)
De3coy I think you make terrain by hand, am I righ. How you make all textures look natural ( not visible textures triangles)
Sorry for my English
Thanks

(mrfin) #2

take a look here: http://home.comcast.net/~saberpeak/website/technicalNotes.html

(Flippy) #3

basically you need a blend texture. Say you have 3 “parts” (or triangles) of terrain. The left 2 are dirt and the right one is grass. You want the grass and the dirt to blend into eachother so you don’t get the seam in the middle.
For this you need to write a shader that blends two textures and apply it to the middle part of the terrain.
(You also need so called “alphabrushes” which define where to start and end the blend…)

i cant explain it in a single post, so do a search for “alpha blending” and you will find alot… (note, its best to try normal alpha blending at first and not “dotproduct2 alpha blending” because it requires a lot more things to work)

(DerSaidin) #4

http://simland.planetquake.gamespy.com/pages/articles/terrain1_1.htm

(obsidian) #5

If you’re refering to old-school meta shaders, then I disagree with you. Q3Map2 terrain blending is leaps and bounds easier than meta shaders. No alphamap needed. 1 or 2 terrain shaders can essentially do it all. No worldspawn or terrain entity keys to mess with.

Sock’s tutorial is the best place to start.

(d3coy) #6

I agree that socks tutorial is the best place to start.

I do all my terrain by hand, basically brush after brush, making sure that each vertice matches those around it.

One thing you want to do when you modify your brushes is hold done ctrl then move the brush edges around as desired. This will keep the brush with smooth faces and not chopped diagonally. Some areas and transitions will need to be triangles and not rectangles do to the transitions. Or else the brush will be cut in half by the compiler and could create gaps in the map.

Try Socks tutorial posted above… it even includes several sample maps to use as you are reading the tutorial. If you still need help, send me a pm on here and Ill see what I can do to help out.

(Kic) #7

thank you all

(=PoW= Kernel 2.6.5) #8

I was trying to learn this myself and found this thread after much searching on the forums.

Can we get this added to the “Tutorial and ET Mapping” section under the heading of Terrain?

I looked at the shader manual but it’s still a bit over my head.

The original Q3 terrain manual lost me too.

The Simland and Sabre Peak tutorials seem to be easier to understand.

Thanks for the links !!!