New Town terrain question.

[Induane]

Quick question really.  If I were making a town for Planeshift, and it needed to be nestled in a canyon, do I have to make a terrain algorythm or can I model it. I have a nice one done, and it fits well, and is fast enough I think, only 256 verticies for the whole terrain of the land.  Is this possible or am I going to have to learn yet another new something?

[odd2k]

I\'d say you can do whatever the heck you want as long as the end result comes out good. If you want a quick way to make outdoor terrain, you might want to look into displacement maps. Or just model it by hand, it don\'t really see how it matters

[Thenior]

The Crystal Space engine uses a Height map to calculate the terrain.

Although for a canyon, it might difficult. As long as you have no overhangs, it should be quite managable though.

[JellyWerker]

dang, that\'s some low poly land, find out what the land in ps is, what each poly/tile represents in length.

[Thenior]

If I used the image


and used it in the terrain engine, I would get the following (of course not in wireframe:



So you asking how do I model it is consuing to me.... again unless you have a overhang

[odd2k]

That\'s odd.. Why would the engine use height maps instead of normal polygons/meshes? And do we _have_ to use this method for terrain? :S

[Induane]

The height maps are probabily good for generating large ammounts of terrain in a long continuous map without having to display lots of mesh.  The height map might just be faster;  The reason I ask is because alot of the stuff is built into the terrain and...well here check out a screenshot of how it sort of looks:\"

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EDIT: I removed the screenshot because I realized that it was freaking huge and extremely annoying - a similar one is in a post below this one in a thumbnail view.
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I added a ton of vertexes to make it look nice though.  I can remove some while I\'m optomizing, but that is for a later date.

[Cyl]

hmm about overhangs, I remember the same problem in morrowind, and some modder pretty much solved that with static objects for the overhangs.

hmm lemme think, if it needs a height map, ..., well you could lie a plane-light above then make an orthogonal render from above and if you set the light right you should have a height map ...

[ArcaneFalcon]

Edit: Cyl, after re-reading what you said I think I understand.  That may work, but it\'s a pretty odd way of doing it.  It\'d be better to look for a plugin or the like methinks.

About your models, why are the steps on the temple thing 1/3 the height of the houses?  Overall I guess it will simply depend on how good your textures are.

:emerald:

[Induane]

The scaling is partially because I just havn\'t decided how big everything should be yet.  As for textures I suck, but am improving slowly.

[ArcaneFalcon]

I generally spend at least as much time on my textures as I do on my model.  Usually, however, I end up spending 2 to 3 times as much time on the texture (and that doesn\'t include time for the uv unwrap).  If you suck at textures then I suggest you check out some other people\'s textures and see how they made them.  Let me get you started >
StrangeFate - This guy just does awesome work all around, this link is to a few of the materials he did for Unreal Tournament 2k3.  He shows his different layers and how he blended them.  Note that this is just for tileable textures.
Bobo the Seal - This is a skinning mini-tut by a guy that has done contract work on more games than you knew existed (though he now works at Iron Lore).
poopinmymouth - This guy is my hero.  Look at his texturing tutorial, texturing theory paper, and his jpg on dirtying up textures.

There are tons of other links on Bobo\'s site you can look at.  Remember, texturing isn\'t something to take lightly, it can literally make or break your models.

Edit: I changed the URL on the strangefate link because he doesn\'t want people linking directly to that page for some reason.  It\'s simple to find though, from the index go A (art) > ? (tutorials) > bottom most tutorial.

:emerald:

[Induane]

Thank you so much for your reply. That is exactly what I have been looking for.  I do alright with drawing in Gimp - here is the URPS banner I made - with some shadow aid from Kuragon to make the flag look more wavy, and advice from some other people:



and here is what I\"m working on now in blender - the town of Vaalnor:

A small dwelling of terrible texturedness:


and a town shot:



I\'ll go through your links tonight when I get off work.

[Gentar]

you should try getting cherpow or arcane falcon to texture it for you. heck, I could even give it a go, just for practice.

[Induane]

Well, after some talk with a few people I think that will be the last I mention this project really publicly.  But we are definately in need of help so anyone who wants to contribute to the Community of Vaalnor, please stop by our site and leave a post (I\'ll create a forum for this) and stop by our chat too - plexus.shacknet.nu #urps
Thanks!