Hills and Mountains

[Mirek]

Hi There !!!

I'm currently looking for a good way to build high mountains/cliffs on the edge and sorounding my map. The best way I found so far is to use basic cut up brushes with appropriate textures.

Any other ideas out there???

Thanks
Mirek

[brk_n_run71]

You can do some pretty cool things with Gensurf. It is a Quake 3 plugin that works with MOHRad. Get It here:

http://tarot.telefragged.com/gensurf/

[tltrude]

I don't know if you are using LOD Terrain, but it is pretty simple to make moutains with it.

Create a large flat brush with the moutain texture and scale the texture up until it looks good--4 or 5. Place the brush in the air above where you want the mountain. Next, with the brush highlighted, goto LOD Terrain and click on "Create from brush". Now press Shift A and adjust the bulge to about 70% or so and the size to about half the size of your moutain. Now highlight the moutian terrain and hit key V. Click on a central dot and raise it up slowly (LOD scale1 will help you see it better, but it lags the editor). When you are done draging the points (edge ones down etc...), lower the whole thing down and slightly below your normal terrain so the edges don't show.

You can do this with your normal terain too, but the edges of the texture will show.

Hope that helps.



Note: The bulge settings are important. A setting of size 64 willl move only one dot and make a thorn like projection, but it can be used to lower points that stick out too.

[Mirek]

Thanks guys,

I was a bit shy on LOD terrain, mainly as the amount of it in my map slows my machine to a crawl. ( need a new one ) The effect is much better but.
Also I didn't know about the SHift-A popup which explains why it was a misery and a time waste dragging every single point. Should read the manual aye?

I've just downloaded Gensurf and hanging to give it a go!!!


Thanks again
Mirek

[Moal]

well I tried the 197 plugin and it crashes MOHRadiant

[tltrude]

Gensurf is weird. I couldn't get it to make anything usefull. There are render quality options under "View" that should help with your editor lag.

[Balr14]

197 is the wrong Gensurf plug-in for to use for MOHRadiant. That's for GTKRadiant. E-mail me and I'll send you the right one.

There are problems using LOD terrain to make mountains. First, the maximum height you can get from a section of LOD terrain is 512 units. Second, texture stretching can be extreme and look really bad. Third, unless you are really careful how you use it, it generates a very high face count. Last, even if you use the lower rendering settings, that only works for distance. If you have a large mountain, as soon as you get close enough to cause one section of LOD terrain to render in full, all related sections of LOD terrain are rendered in full.

I combine all three (Gensurf brushes, LOD terrain and patch meshes) for best results and low face counts.