Terrain questions

(slack) #1

I’m having troubles making good terrain and was wondering if anyone had any good links and or tips.

I can make terrain fine , but it just either looks too smooth , too many vertical walls or too many triangle angles. For a outdoor terrain say like fuel dump what is the aprox size of the map and its divisions ( columns and rows). Right now I’m messing with a terrain that is approx 8,000x8,000 with 64x64 divisions. Is this adequate to get the effect I’m trying for.

If anyone who is more experienced mapping could give a run down of how he creates his terrain that would be great. Again I’m not having any troubles making the terrain just manipulating it to make good natural shapes.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

(NOP) #2

what is 64x64 the number of your divisions or your division widths?
If it’s your division widths (meaning you have a 125x125 “grid”) then you should increase this to at least 128x128(or even higher if you can)because right now you have a total of 15,625 brushes or 31,250 triangles for your terrain alone.
The fueldump terrain uses 256x256 division widths(by the way you can check this yourself by just decompiling the map)
These division widths might look a little large but phong shading will help it a lot to look smooth.
Personally I use easygen for my terrain because it’s so easy to make the alphamap with it, but you don’t really have to because there are a bunch of features in the newest versions of q3map2(namely dotproduct blending and alphaMod brushes) that completely eliminate the need for alphamaps. That’s why I’m also using 3dmax for some portions of the terrain.
Hope this helps

(slack) #3

64x64 is the number of divisions as according to easy gen , I’ll have to check on the division-widths. Thanks for the response.

(slack) #4

Yep my division widths are 128x128. That 64x64 (named ‘divisions’ in easygen) is the amount of blocks in each row.

Now I know more divisions will equal less FPS. So as a general rule of thumb what would be a acceptable and/or preferable range.

(NOP) #5

well it depends on how much more geometry(buildings etc) you will add to it.
I generally go by the triangle count. Right now you have 64x64 = 4096 faces = 8192 triangles for your whole terrain. That’s actually not bad considering that you’ll probably never see all of the terrain at once.
As a general rule you should try to keep the visible triangles count under 20,000 for most of your map to get good performance(you can check your triangle count by using the r_speeds 1 command in game)
Now… depending on how much more geometry you add to your map, and how efficiently you build it your tris count can spike up a lot but I think for right now your terrain is fine

(FireFly) #6

The problem I ran into while creating the terrain for my map was detail vs r_speeds.

To reduce r_speeds I used 256*256 divisions (like they did in fueldump).
But some places where the terrain would hit buildings or at a narrow passage the terrain was to "rough’’ and didn’t look real.

So in radiant I replaced some 256 div. with 128 or smaller sized divisions…

(MadJack) #7

FireFly, that’s a great idea… I never thought about doing something like that…

Thanks for the tip :smiley:

(FireFly) #8

well, it’s actually socks’ idea, here’s the link: http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=2040

It will take some time to ‘manually’ edit your terrain in Radiant but I think it’s really worth the effort…