River and bank testing GV micro terrain.

[bustr]

Sometimes because of the direction of the bias you will be creating runoff canyons, the only method to do it is one mouse click at a time. Set the brush just larger than a single polygon and use the raise hill tool. Then one 2000ft\sec quick mouse click you start pulling up little ridges while the meeting between each group defines the canyon. Looking up from the base you can make out the canyon and ridge runs. Later on painting highlights them. The polygon size limits everything you make so it had better be a good illusion.

The tops of the ridge runs are about 3000ft and the base is 500ft.





Another angle and the wire frame version clearly shows a canyon system that painting will reveal.

[bustr]

It all comes down to illusions and giving the eye what it wants to see and the brain does the rest.

[bustr]

I hate transitions because you cannot go on across the whole terrain with one repetitious topo feature. They change for all kinds of reasons and transition in the real world along with looking chaotic.


Once again a transitional idea, in this case inspired by a lazy mistake from a few weeks ago where I told myself I will clean it up later while I was prepping for this whole run of mountains and canyon runoffs. Truth is, those lazy mistakes give you the seed of a random transition to keep from looking cookie cutter all over the terrain. I kept introducing cap rock starta and stepp strata farther back in this valley. So it's not unlikely some strata would be uplifted and stay intact at the terminus of the range.


I've expanded the foundation for this last work block and will fill it out from here and do the painting.








Just think, when I get this one finished, I get to come up with another mountain range on the other side of the river, weeeeeee.

[bustr]

Now it's ready to be weathered out of this base block carved state. All those straight line cuts will get massaged into something else, they are just place holders to work from. If you drop in a small hole at the top and bottom of a cut line target, then pull the bulldozer tool between the two holes, you get a sudden canyon. You can connect the dots that way across flat ground to create a complex canyon system. I will come back in and use the bulldozer tool with it's smallest brush to move the small features of the terrain into their finished look. It works kind of like using your finger to adjust the shape of a subject's nose on a clay bust.





 

[Skuzzy]

I don't know about anyone else, but I am enjoying these posts bustr.

[Ciaphas]

I really like the look of the terrain in post 29.

I’m wondering if you are treating airfields around multiple enemy vehicle bases as priority targets by placing multiple spawns to the airfield from each vehicle base?

Example:

A53 sets in sector 10,5 and two enemy VB sit in 11,5 and 10,6, both VB have multiple spawns to A53. Allowing for 4 avenues of attack.

Not sure if you have covered this, though you might have.

Cheers,
Ciaphas


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bustr]

Thank you Skuzzy, I'm trying to do my part to encourage the creativity afforded to everyone with our game. And it keeps me on my toes since I'm bringing my audience along with me on this trip as I keep inventing something every day out of thin air.

Ciaphas,

First task after I finish the macro terrain process is to create the spawn flow around the terrain and decide which half of the fields will get the map room on the field and which half gets a town. Each country will have only two vBases which will logically support the port. Then I add a third spawn from an airfield since the ports will become primary capture targets due to how small I'm making the central pond as a task group furball arena. The secondary lakes are just that and will not host task groups. Each port will support a CV\BB task group duo. Hitech likes not all airfields having spawns to them as I like routing GV support of air combat initiatives to keep the community together, you see this clearly on my first two terrains. I intend to bring the HQ\strats in closer to the active feilds while still populating the back field and I will have to add three uncapturable airfields to support them back there.

I've learned to wait on the spawn paths until I'm ready to lay down field objects and have to create micro terrain for tank combat. From the screen shot below you can see how much macro terrain is on my mind at this time.

[bustr]

Painted and done, now on to another mountain range and pulling something new every day out of my........

[bustr]

Right when I thought it was safe to go in the water.....I came up with some transitions again...... Wonder how I'm going to pull this off.......

Filled in and made a long crack but it will need vertical water cut side canyons and something logical to transition down from 12,000ft onto that 9,000ft area sitting on that 5,000ft rear area elevation. My head hurts looking at it in this blank state even blocked in to this point. I'll have to doodle on it for awhile, maybe look at pictures from the rift valley in aftica where these kinds of areas in real life don't look for real. More like something a terrain designer would create for some fantasy MMORPG game. Most of this I don't have to make up, just adapt what I find looking at geological formation pictures from the rift valley. I guess it's easier to just let the algorithms in L3DT do their cookie cutter topo creation thing if you like that kind of stuff. You can always tell an MA terrain that was created in L3DT if you pull far enough back and look at the "random" but highly repeating pattern of "randomness".

Even the narrow side cut canyons can be knocked out quickly with the elevation tool and the bulldozer tool. It's first a matter of seeing them in the rock and cutting everything away to reveal them.

[Ciaphas]

Thanks for the response Bustr.

I wasn't sure if I articulated what I was referring to proper;y, hopefully this quick image will work.

Maybe swarming Vehciles spawn points around airfields and VH spawn points like shown below would help to get the total war effort going. Kind of like adding do or die bases to the maps.

[bustr]

Ciaphas,

Please build your terrain and submit it for inclusion.

[bustr]

Now I've had the opportunity to work a bit on blending the terrain boarder into the body of the terrain while pulling something out of my whatsis to build out that crack that begins the south side of the rift valley.


I got to update the tops of these buttresses with nice cap rocks. I didn't like how I originally did the tops weeks ago. Now everything ties together with the rock strata theme for this valley.

[Rodent57]

Fascinating!

And you've convinced me that I'm probably NOT going to try to build accurate maps!

[bustr]

Why? I'm pulling this off by setting primary elevations at the beginning and not varying from them as I work from the edges into the pond at the center. That is why when I created the heightmap to import and popup the first time arena, I set broad basic elevations as guides. You can see how I highlighted those with terrain tile clutter bands as my first task just after I ran the import. Because I did the elevations in whole number steps, there is a painting tool in the terrain editor that will allow you to target global elevation bands.

The terrain editor is very simple if you first create a 1:1 blueprint file of your terrain with everything mapped out. Then you don't force yourself to use the terrain editor for that task. It dosn't work very well that way. My 1:1 blueprint file had a layer in it that directly converted to 16bit grayscale and then into an importable hightmap file to popup my land masses in my terrain. You can see my painted topo elevations in the screen shot below. I created the foundational elevations in my 1:1 2048x2048 pixel 8pixel=1mile blueprint file. Then converted that to a heightmap knowing what I would carve once I had the basic terrain in place with the elevation blocks and the water already in place. The theme for this terrain was rift valleys and the internet is full of photos from the east Africa Great Rift Valley. After that it's on me to pull some rift valley's out of my whatsis......

The trick to this is to do about a sector of work a day or some block you define. Setup the basic landscape ready for sculpting one day while working out transitions. Sculpt the landscape the next day and do clean up work getting ready for the next day's painting of that area. Painting usually does not take long, so you move into basic setup of the next work block. Be prepared after developing a landscape creation technique you like to suddenly discover a faster or better technique that can cause you to revisit some of your previous work to touch up to a better quality of outcome. The most foundational thing to remember is the size of the individual polygon in the polymesh will dictate how you build everything. Once you accept that and become familiar with how it responds to the tools, the rest is creating the illusion of a world. Painting helps quite a lot if you work with three colors to provide 3D contrast the eye wants to turn into what it expects to see. Otherwise, the terrain editor's polymesh is clunky as heck to keep from frying the customers FPS. It's all about illusions surrounding the smallest building block of 660x660 which is also your smallest brush. CLUNKY....... 

[bustr]

This mega formations are addictive to futz with....