I was wondering what the “correct” way of building terrain in gtkradiant is?
My way is make a brush and cut it up diagonally into 4 triangles, and then write shaders
for blending etc. Are there any keys you need to set in gtk for it to be treated as
terrain? What are those common/terrain shaders used for?
My current terrain seems to work fine except the scaling via q3map_tcGen ivector…
/Kobayashi
I dont think there is a "correct way of building anything, so long as you follow a few rules.
This is how I make terrain
i supose in theory the correct way is to build it with the effect you want with the lowest hit on performance
der’saidin’s method is quite a good one to use but however a few surgestions of my own for changing that method to suit terrain and general editor convinience
*first triangulate the mesh. GTK radent can often run into problems when manipulating square brushes vertices. something happens when the maps saved that causes problems. particualry bad if you want to go back and make changes to the map after a bit of testing
*always work in grid size 4. it makes it easier to line the vertices up but still gives a impresion that the terrain is not built on a too solid grid stucture
*arange the basic brushes in the shape you want to overall terrain to end up in it makes it much easier than trying to do this when randomising the terrain vertices
*its often easier to place the brushes that form the part of the terrain that you want to be the walkable part down first and then creating a fairly level terrain grid here. when walking over even a lightly randomised mesh its quite noticable and you dont want it to apear so bumpy that its iriitating
*when you have the walkable terrain made place the hill sloped etc around it and then build them in. its helpfull to seperate the too difernt stages of terrain creation where the hills have very large veritce movement and the walkable terrain is very subtle and small
when you have that the other half of the battle that is a good texture and shader that are just as important
i have known on other maps where the terrain has been split so much and maniplated that the square grid structure is not very noticable but can give a very detailed look. practice on some basic meshes in test maps untill you comforatable and experiement to gind a way of doing this method that suits you and your map
Okay just wanted to know if I did something stupid…
Thanks for the suggestions and tutorial.
I’ve been using vertex editing for forming the terrain close to that in
Der’saidins tutorial. That works well for me.
/Kobayashi
Q3Map2 Terrain Shaders:
http://simland.planetquake.gamespy.com/pages/articles/terrain1_1.htm