The difficulties of terrain editing...

(Ubiquitous) #1

I have reached the point in developing my map where I need to start altering terrain to make tunnels going through some of the mountains… I have been avoiding this so far in my map making, because I know it will be the hardest thing I will have to do, along with scripting. I look at a map like fueldump, and I cringe with pain as I think how complex it must be to connect two sides of my map via tunnels… I am basically looking for a few pointers, tutorials, ideas (ANYTHING), to some of the most often used techniques for hacking away at terrain… Also, another issue I will eventually have is splitting my map up into portals, I think this will be a must, since my map is just a bit smaller than oasis. My second question is if there are any good RTCW/ET portal tutorials out there… Thanks for any help.

(ziege) #2

I was messing around with Terrain for the first time recently and made a pretty big map, then decided to put tunnels everywhere through all the mountains. All I did was deleted brushes in my terrain for the size I wanted the tunnel exits, only took a few mins. For the few places where I wanted exits but the terrain brushes weren’t falling in the right place, I just deleted a few then clipped the others to match. Piece of cake :slight_smile:

[Edit: Er, unless you meant caves? Straight tunnels are too easy, but yeh caves are tricky, there’s a long thread already explaining how it’s done]

(*[SfS]*OpTeRoN) #3

Caves can be easy if you can clip the terrain to match up your cave’s ceiling, etc…

(hummer) #4

I create the caves and caves mouths in 3ds max… then just lift the terrain brushes up so the caves fit inside.

(Ubiquitous) #5

I have heard of the thin mesh option in Easygen… Does that make it any easier to edit the terrain? What exactly does the thin mesh option do?

(ziege) #6

It’d be pretty difficult to edit terrain without using thin mesh :eek2: Instead of having a solid block of terrain you should just have a surface of thin brushes that you can delete and edit easily. Try it :slight_smile:

(tubbie) #7

Before you edit your terrain within radiant make sure you snap your terrain to the grid. If you don’t it can really make a mess of your terrain by creating tiny gaps that are almost unnoticeable in radiant but will show up ingame.
You do this by first selecting your gridsize ( I usually choose gridsize 2 or 4 but if you don’t have any high mountains you can try gridsize 8)
select your terrain (ctrl+alt+left click)
snap to grid (ctrl+g)

Here are some screens to show what I mean:

(Slaughter) #8

Hi all,
I also think that terrain building is too damn complicated… in fact I am almost giving up on my just started ET map building saga because of that… :frowning:

Well, building a terrain is a fair simple process, but fiting it to my expectations is not… I would like to know how you pros build an almost entirely outdoors map (just like the official ones by SD). After the planing phase, you build the whole terrain first (with all the bumps, cliffs, mountains, rivers, etc) and then start playing with the buildings and stuff, right? It seems to me that playing with terrain brushes inside radiant is kind of an herculean work, am I wrong? (I hope so :D) in that case, to achieve some success, the terrain must be completely finished and polished before you start building other stuff, right? If I need to change some topography to fit my needs, what are the radiant tools can I use to do it? Are there alternatives to terrain brushes (curved patches, simple brushes, I don’t know…)? Where should I use terrain brushes and where should I avoid? Are there any tricks for texturing them beatifully? (If you see what I mean here, there are lots of custom maps out there full of crap ugly mountains on it…)

As you see, there are lots of questions about terrain roaming in my mind… I would welcome any help, hint, trick you can share… after playing with terrain building for the whole weekend, I am seriously questioning my capacity to get my ET map idea done… and I will not even start it if I figure that I can’t finish it… :frowning:

(well, maybe I do, because I don’t like giving up easily… :banghead: :bash: )

:smiley:
Cheers

(system) #9

have heard of the thin mesh option in Easygen… Does that make it any easier to edit the terrain? What exactly does the thin mesh option do?

It just gives you a thin mesh, like the ame said. All under the little brush is hollow.
But ydnar said the compile will take longer with thin_mesh export.

(SCDS_reyalP) #10

the main reason terrain on a lot of custom maps looks bad is because you can see that it is tiled. Avoiding this is a matter of selecting the right textures, scaling them appropriatly, and controling what distances/angles players see them from.

Another thing that is very common is having very steep angles, which make the textures look stretched and blurry. The simple solution to this is to not make your terrain so steep. If you want to make a cliff, create it seperatly.

Yet another common problem is obvious texture seams. This is usually caused by having a junction of 3 different values in the alphamap, or using tcmod with q3map_globaltexture.

Creating nice looking terrain is not hard. You just have to put the time into understanding how it works and not stopping until it looks good. I strongly suggest reading the terrain manual. Although it is a bit out of date, it describes the priciples a lot better than most of the easygen oriented tutorials do.

(Slaughter) #11

Thanks for the info SCDS, :drink:
The Terrain Manual that you mentioned is this one?
http://www.qeradiant.com/manual/Terrain_Manual/start.html

I’ll read it throughly!

(SCDS_reyalP) #12

Thats the one.

The main things that have changed since that was written

  • ydnars lightmapped terrain stuff. You should find a few threads on lightmapped terrain in the q3map2 forums. Also using q3map_baseshader to make your shaders easier to manage. The terrain shaders included with the sd maps show both of these.
  • you can now use easygen to generate the terrain brushes and entity keys. It can also produce shaders, but they don’t take advantage of many of the q3map enhancements.
  • Some of the other requirements have been relaxed as well. The terrain verticies no longer have to be on a regular grid, so you could use decimate in gensurf, or move vertices around in X,Y to fit buildings.
(Slaughter) #13

Thanks again SCDS!
I’ve read the manual and some of the changes you’ve mentioned I could figure out for myself (I guess this means that I’m begining to understand terrain stuff much better now!). There’s one thing though that I didn’t understand well, the section of the manual concerning the addition of buildings to the terrain says:

Detail Content. With few exceptions ALL the geometry inside the terrain map is detail content, not just the terrain entity. The walls forming the corridor in mpterra2 may be the only non-detail structures in that map. Making geometry into detail makes a map far easier and faster to compile. If you want to block vis inside your structures, create simple caulk structures … much the same way as described for vis blocking the terrain.

Does it still apply to Wolf ET? Is this recomended just to reduce compile times or it increases in-game performance or something? I thought it would be good to do most buildings made of structural brushes, to help with vis… but that statement from the manual says just the opposite :huh:.

Thanks again for your help! :notworthy:

(SCDS_reyalP) #14

You have to decide what the structure is going to achieve. If it has the potential to keep large numbers of triangles from being drawn, than it is probably worthwhile. The Q3TA terrain maps were a lot simpler than the ET maps. With modern systems and ydnars improvements to q3map2, compile times should be less of a factor.

For example, think about oasis:
It has three major sections, all of which are connected by tunnels that you cannot see directly through (that little S bend you see in so many professional FPS maps exists for a very good reason). Those sections clearly need structural walls between them. Within those areas, it won’t make much difference if a lot of the content is structural or detail. For example, the rooms with the flag and health/ammo cabinets wouldn’t hide much, but the wall between them might keep you from seeing all the way from the old city wall to the allied command post. The walls around the guns and axis spawn have the capability to block out quite a bit. You cannot see the triangle heavy areas of the cave and old city entrances.

(ziege) #15

That’s exactly how I do it. Although I’m still learning, there may be more effecient methods I don’t know about. I wouldn’t say playing with terrain brushes is herculean work, but yes it’s trickier than playing with completely square brushes. My main problem is my comp isn’t fast enough to let me move around the map with ease in Radiant, but using regions helps a lot, it makes the job pretty easy once you’ve regioned off the part you’re working on.

Yes it reduces compile times considerably. Buildings that block the players view should be structural, but not the entire building, for example have the walls structure but everything else detail. Like the manual says, pretty much everything should be detail except the most basic main structures. Since the terrain is detail, to stop the entire map being drawn at once you need to put caulk structure brushes inside mountains and large hills, etc.

(Slaughter) #16

SCDS wrote:

For example, think about oasis:
It has three major sections, all of which are connected by tunnels that you cannot see directly through (that little S bend you see in so many professional FPS maps exists for a very good reason). Those sections clearly need structural walls between them

ziege wrote:

Buildings that block the players view should be structural, but not the entire building, for example have the walls structure but everything else detail

Thanks guys,
Now I got the point and it really makes sense…

Well, back to terrain editing stuff: does everybody uses this “thin mesh” option? Now that you’ve mentioned it and explained the way it works, it seems to be much easier when it comes to editing the terrain inside Radiant. Does it affect in-game performance or just compile times? Are There any other disadvantages?

Cheers

(SCDS_reyalP) #17

I wouldn’t use thin mesh. It will add a bit to the size of your BSP, but probably not affect performance much (I’m speculating here). If you want a tunnel under your terrain, just select the terrain brushes that will be above the tunnel and cut their bottoms off with the clipper. Unless you want your tunnels to really conform to the inside of the terrain, this shouldn’t take much work at all.

(Slaughter) #18

I wouldn’t use thin mesh. It will add a bit to the size of your BSP, but probably not affect performance much (I’m speculating here).

hmmm, I’ll try the more conventional way then, I’ve also read in other
threads that it is not recommended for some reason…

Thanks again for your help! :notworthy: [/quote]

(GemInI) #19

I feel ya Slaughter. The terrain aspect of mapping has really bogged down my enthusiasm for creating my first Map. I tooo am a n000b to mapping. But…this thread has some helpful info in it.

Going to read thru the Terrain Manual and try and get a better grasp on it.