Terrain Editor or Tesselation for outdoor areas?

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Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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Originally posted by Wiz
I personally prefer using the terrain tool for outdoor land scapes

HELL YEAH! That's what I always use. Now I've discovered the beuty of it I'll never even think of terraedit or tess. cubes now :D

Finally, someone else that uses the terrain brush ;)
 

Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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Oh, and that tut doesn't tell you IMO the most important thing that I've learnt when making terrain, that is to edit the vertecies horizontally aswell as vertically. It gets rid of all those 90 and 45 degree corners that you normally get and also makes the landscape look a hell of a lot smoother and natural.
[rant]
Remember, this is a 3D game, terrain vertecies will move left, right, forward and back. Not just up and down. This is what everyother mapper seems to forget when it comes to terrain. And tess. cubes just plain suck IMO (except for rocks, ledges and other small terrain features) :rolleyes:
[/rant]
 

GoldenMouse

Mad Hatter
Nov 14, 2001
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I've been using the terrain brush for all my terrains, but....extenuating circumstance. I want to make realistic caverns, like the opening room of AS-Guardia. I hear they used some other program. Was it terraedit or something else?
 

Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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It looks Max'd to me. I think terraedit is just for outdoor terrain like the terrain brush. Not sure though
You can always try Tarquins extruder. The new randomiser is quite good, not great, but beats editing 100+ tess. cubes. It's only really good for tunnel-type caves, not large open ones though.
OR you can try the vertex edited sphere. I've never tried it myself, but I know quite a few ppl use that technique
 

Chrysaor

Lord of the Pants
Nov 3, 2001
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I've vertexed edited a sphere, it was ****, i wish i hadn't. I mean it looked like rock but it wasn't a pleasurable experience, max woulda worked much better.

here's the new terrain I've got for a new TO map, it's a good example of what Bot's talking about...
 

Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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York, UK
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about :). Post a 3D view screen, then compare it to a terraed (or whatever) terrain brush. It looks much more natural & less angular.
 

Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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Nah, I'll post one instead :p

This is with terraed
Notice the 45 and 90 degree corners everywhere. Also, with terred, you can only raise & lower verticies using a grid size 1/4 of the segment size. So if you chose to have 512x512 segments, then you'll only be able to raise/lower the terrain in steps of 128 units, which looks really stupid.
Here, each terrain 'segment' is 128x128 (A bit small) and verticies have been raised/lowered with a grid size of 32.
 

Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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York, UK
Now, with the terrain brush, you can move the verticies around laterally (sp?) to make it looks much smoother.
Also, you have the freedom to chose any grid size. Here, it's still 128x128 segments, but I used a grid size of 16 to edit the terrain.
Note how much smoother it looks. It is a lot higher poly, but now you can make much better looking terrain, you can use a segment size of around twice as big as you would with terraed and it would still look good. Here, if this was a portion of a much larger terrain brush then i'd be using segment size of 256x256 which would give 4 times lower polys than what is shown here.

(normally I'd have segment size of 256 or 512 and use a 64 grid setting to edit it. 32 in some places if it's an emergency.)
 

Chrysaor

Lord of the Pants
Nov 3, 2001
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Hiding in your Attic
Originally posted by Call me Erdrik


I really don't see the difference between Max and the Terrain brush.... There both just vertex editing...

I've yet to do it because i don't have max, but UVW mapping shows lots of promise. Screenshots of Rich's Monastery2 look quite good.