Terrain & Buildings question

(slack) #1

First I want to thank everyone on these forums and especially Sock for spending so much of their time helping newbies. I’ve been messing with Radiant and ET for a couple of weeks now and this forum has been a great wealth of knowledge for me.

I’m trying my best not to ask any noob questions and waste little of others time. I have had no problem understanding the scripts and basics and can make maps that load fine , but I do need a little direction.

My question is about connecting the terrain to buildings. For instance the snow levels where it appears the terrain is smoothly placed up against walls. Can anyone direct me to any info on the best practice for doing this?

Thanks :smiley:

(Loffy) #2

Hm, sometimes the walls are just stuck into the ground. Yes, the terrain and the wall is thus mixed/stuck into each other. But, usually this is not a problem.
// Loffy

(Ifurita) #3

There was a tutorial (long) but it seems down. I’ve been doing a lot of this though, so let me see if I can summarize.

  1. It helps if your terrain grids are square
  2. When you build your structure, try to make the sides line up with the edges of your terrain brushes. You should see a huge patchwork of triangles that make up your terrain mesh. Line up the sides of your building with the outer edge of the triangle on which it sits
  3. Sink your building into the terrain as desired
  4. Highlight the terrain brushes that are above the roof of your structure, Ctrl-tab to change views, click on the top of your roof just to see where is its, then unselect it. Use X to clip off your terrain brushes at the level below the top of your roof.
  5. You might have terrain brushes visible inside your structure. As long as no part of the brush extends outside your walls, you can just delete them - this is why you want to line up your sides perfectly
  6. If you do have peices of terrain that exist both insdie and outside the boundaries of your structure, you’ll have to clip them. I tend to clip them, but leave both pieces, then readjust the piece inside.
  7. As a practice, everytime I clip terrain, I take a quick fly around to make sure I didn’t leave any caulked faces showing.

That’s probably a bit confusing, but that’s what I’ve been doing on my map

(ratty redemption) #4
  1. If you do have peices of terrain that exist both insdie and outside the boundaries of your structure, you’ll have to clip them. I tend to clip them, but leave both pieces, then readjust the piece inside.

I`m curious, why do you leave the cut terrain tris inside your building?

(Ifurita) #5

I clip them into two pieces, then delete/adjust the left over piece inside. The fringe brushes are the dodgiest and sometimes if I’ve clipped wrong or calculated wrong, I end up with pieces of my visible terrain missing. So I just take it a little slower, but the interior pieces do end up being deleted