Modelling terrain is a
pain in the neck. The geo-mode in Dedit is powerful, but not powerful
enough in my opinion. You simply can't work with the number of triangles
necessary to make terrain as detailed as that which appears in the
game, using Dedit, because the vertex editing tools have some major
limitations.
You can at least make it look passable though.
Koyasha and Neo have outlined the modelling side, so let's assume that
you have read that, and you now have a nice big wall of rock in front of
you. The first thing to do is hit CTRL+B to go into brush mode, select all of the triangles which make up your terrain and hit SHIFT+J to join them together.
If
you have any textures which don't line up correctly, select your brush,
right click on it and select TEXTURE->Reset texture coordinates.
This will remove any panning or size changes which have been made to the
textured faces, and all of the faces should line up properly.
Go into the properties of your new rocky-mountain and make sure that the lighting is set to Gourad. Save, process then run. Your rocks should look kind of like this:
Notice
how the edges are very harsh? In all 3D packages there is a surface
property, usually called smoothing, which changes the way that light is
mapped across edges to give the effect that there aren't any edges. In
this way, a sphere can be created in 3D and look effective without
having billions of polys. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do this in
Dedit?
Well, you can
Go into the properties of your brush again, and select LightControl:
You should get this panel:
Now
see down the bottom, the field called CreaseAngle? This is the
smoothing control. The value of the field is the maximum angle at which
an edge is smoothed. It defaults to 45 °, so edges with an angle from 0 °
- 45 ° will be smoothed, which is not really smooth enough for most
terrain. Set it to 180 °, which means that pretty much every edge will
be smoothed.
Save, process and run. Your rocks should look like this:
Much better
More Terrain tips
Started by
CoachJason
, May 07 2005 10:55 PM
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