River and bank testing GV micro terrain.

[bustr]

The next 10 screen shots are of a type of artifact effect left over from using a terrain tool to create something else on a slope from say 500ft down to 10 feet. I never thought about it much until the GVDAR posts and what about half the GVers in the game really want as terrain to fight other GVs. Safe high spots to shoot each other or hide behind. Hitech making it possible to use bridges introduced some problems in creating the rivers for them to cross with how I shaped the river banks. While building Oceania these were an irritation that I had to smooth away to maintain the elevation around the rivers. My new terrain has many opportunities to use this feature.

The conversation about how GVers like spawning in on a high area over looking the town and airfield, and the untended consequences of a single tank being able to take out all the ack and the vHanger at will from several miles out has made the idea of doing this unattractive. It imbalances the game. On the other hand if you start with an equal elevation say 500ft, then cut a river between the spawn and the airfield, the spawn does not give an advantage to long range the vHanger. It does create a micro terrain for tanks to shoot from high spots, ambush from low spots, and play peek-a-boo all day long. And terrain like this can be found all over the world, so I'm not building a super mario bros fantasy terrain because someone is unhappy and thinks Hitech is screwing GVers.

The small Hills are all about the same volume as the small hill type surrounding the town. I will probably tweak these more to keep testing the limits of the underlying polygon mesh. Otherwise this is very quick to cut into place in a 1x1 mile square and expand the canyons around the 6mile diameter micro combat area called an airfield\town. I stopped worrying about how pretty a stream looks and cam up with a quick method to get nice river banks at a width to easily support the bridges.



I dropped a spawn into the center of these micro canyons and GVs settle in with no problems.

[bustr]

The last 5 screen shots.

[Dundee]

Is this like the only bridge to the base......? are there others? With the GV dar that we have now...these bridges are just killing fields now.

[bustr]

Dundee,

1. - This is a test terrain where I test features and I wanted to verify I could produce the terrain sculpting error on demand from building Oceania that I want to use as a rapid production feature with my new terrain RiftVal. It works with this kind of topography.
2. - I needed a bridge for river scaling in producing the micro terrain feature and creating a faster way to make rivers the right width for the bridges in the terrain editor. They take too long if I'm futzing over every mile and how they look. I just need water for a bridge because a Gver is too close to the ground to see anything anyway.
3. - Do you read? I explained what I was doing was a test. I'm months from this type of construction on my current terrain. You should really try building a terrain so you can understand terrain limitations. There are many, and most of this is an artful illusion inside of those limitations.

One quick day of experimenting saves me weeks of wasted work later on.

I became curious later to see what the minimum size of rock strata formation looked like from a tank. The minimum brush size is about 100ft wide. The minimum strata that can be shaped within the polygon mesh limits is 100ft wide 100ft tall. From 0 to 500ft you can reasonably pull 3 of those especially if you want to use them as stepped ramps for GV's and to have enough trees on each level to hide in. An enemy tank on the next level up may not find your tank on one of the two lower levels as you traverse to get up to the airfield's elevation of 500ft. The sound will drive him nutz and aircraft may well face plant into the topo feature trying to shoot or bomb you.


A series of screen shots showing step strata ramps up from the river. The ramps at a distance are subtle but, if you kept crossing a bridge at that location the ramps would be your way up and a way to hide until you could get to the top and at the airfield. Repetition of attacking this field would make it a common fast path up from the river.


 








Up close the minimum flat and vertical width of anything you can create in the terrain editor. And why you can quickly end up with ginormous monstrosity rock formations you didn't intend to create because you wanted realism and lost all sense of scale. That is why you drop an airfield into your terrain and gain perspective by getting a tank or plane up close to your monstrosities like I'm doing with that tank in these screen shots. So if we were all 2000ft tall everything would scale right. Otherwise, you accept this glaring limitation of the terrain editor and create illusions, in this case some trees. On my new terrain I have about 39 candidate fields for a river treatment like this when I finally get to adding feilds and creating GV micro combat areas.

[Greebo]

Thanks for posting this Bustr, it is really good information. Now I have finished upgrading all of my skins that lacked bump maps I am taking another look at an MA terrain I built during beta but never had time to finish. I expect I will put a few bridges in here and there using the sort of setup you describe here. Maybe though I'll limit bridges to V bases if the GV radar has tilted the balance too much in favour of planes.

[bustr]

Can't wait to see some of your screen shots as you produce it.

The bulldozer tool set at the smallest diameter brush is the best tool to massage small areas into shape. A quick way to catch on is drop a cylinder down say 1500ft by 1 mile, then shape it into a small mountain or mesa using only the bulldozer tool. Pulling diagonal across a vertical face depending on the cardinal orientation produces some interesting results. Building a stream for the bridge, define the river bed with the elevation tool set to 1 foot and .5-1 mile wide. Then use the elevation tool at -10 and smallest brush to open dots of travel to be connected. Then use the bulldozer set to the smallest diameter and pull from open dot of exposed water to open exposed dot. You end up with open water spaced perfectly for the bridges and the remaining land set to 1ft is way to massage with the raise hill set to 1ft and the shift key. The bridges will settle in well at about -35.

That micro terrain was created by turning on the grid and using the elevation tool at 250 with the smallest brush. The ground is 500 and I outlined a 1x1 with the 250 that sloped into the river from 500. Then I cut a cross and diagonals and massaged the texture pattern into the elevations and shapes in the screen shot. It's artistically time consuming but, you see the results.

[bustr]

Had a new idea for combining the bulldozer with raise hill for fast prototyping. Helps that I want the top to be a cap rock which after forming the runoffs I just pull a wide brush and it puts a cap on top of the canyon face. Later on I just pull a narrow bulldozer down the bottom of this rift and it cleans up the water course. This stuff is easy and quick, it's visualizing the whole area and how I want to treat it. When that image is set in my mind, the fast prototyping takes about 10 minutes for a segment like this. Now the actual final finishing to tie together 100 miles of this rift is another thing as you can see in the lower right corner riftvalley on the CBM map.

[Greebo]

I do the initial topography and field layout work on my terrains in Paint Shop Pro by creating a detailed multi-layer altitude map, converting it to shades of grey and then gaussian blurring the layers. Converting this into something the TE can see was a lot harder in AH III than in AH II and learning how to do it was the main reason for me starting this terrain. It would probably take me a few days to figure it out again but it involved several stages and an extra graphics program called Krita. Your TE terrain shaping techniques seem very good though and I will try them out when I begin to add bridges and do localised terrain shaping for individual fields.

I am currently converting the terrain from the ETO to Med tile set as I think the ETO set has too many trees for good game play, the Med set seems a lot more open. I'll post a map and some screenshots in the terrain forum soon but I need to change a few more things first, like adding battleships and flak bases and changing the super-large airbases to large. After that I'll go through all the fields one at a time and adjust the local textures and topography more carefully, checking the spawn routes, that there are no trees blocking runways and SBs and so on. To avoid burnout I'll just alternate doing a few fields with skinning, so it will take a while to do all 135 fields plus strat etc.

[bustr]

I create a 1:1 blueprint multiplayer png file so 1mile = 8pixel. Then I layout my exact land masses for 20408x2048 centered on a 4096x4096, field placements and so forth. Then I take the land mass layer and create another 16bit png grayscale where 1000 = 0 feet in the terrain editor and only setup my gross elevation blocks since I carve by hand. I do this in Krita in layers so when I push all the layers down into one there are no light gray pixelization outlines. I'll gaussien blur value 5. Then save it as an r16 rotated right 90 degrees. Then I change r16 to raw and import into ImageJ where I save as a RAW format. This imports into the terrain editor as an unsigned heightmap file. Then I carve my world.


This is one of those angles off the cardinal directions that you can't make look pretty. So you have to make the horrible irregularities look like the dominant rock strata in the mountain range and canyons. I looked at the New Guinea map's high elevations mountain canyons up close one night and saw that even Artik's program ends up with the same irregularities I do creating topography in the bias directions off the cardinal directions. It's all about how well you create the illusion because the terrain editor's poly mesh is chunky.....





And then I still have to work on this style of step mesa canyons to bring water ways down into the center task group combat pond. The walls look like stacked coins a bit and water runoff makes the cuts. I have to pull 3000ft deep cracks out of the 12,000ft borders of the terrain. Those cracks will be built by facing two of these at each other. First I've got to do the finishing work on these boarder ones to get a feel for creating the look. These are in the bottom right hand corner of that previous map screenshot and it's easy to see how cracks will start from them running to feed those streams.

[Dundee]

How the heck are you supposed to climb this

[Tracerfi]

How the heck are you supposed to climb this
(Image removed from quote.)

Uhhh my guess is your not. 

[bustr]

Strat runners and bomber missions will look at it as they sail by to hammer an HQ. I have to build a world from scratch and create new techniques to accomplish the terrain themes I impose on myself. Those are just building blocks for step mesas I have to get back to and do the finish sculpting and painting on. I needed them in place to create a logical transition at the top of a rift valley. I have to build everything from those 4000ft tall mesas coming out of the 12,000 ft border around the map, down to those 500 ft topped hills and canyons running down to the river so you GVers can play hide-n-seak and blow each others kesters off.

This is not a simple process if you want to create a world illusion that looks real. What did you think all these years, we just slop a bunch of pixels across a project space and call it a terrain?

[bustr]

Why am I filling this post in with screen shots from a terrain about creating the large scale topographical features? I'm betting 99.1% of players have never seen how their terrains are constructed. There are several ways to do it, this is the most time consuming and hands on intensive like Oceania was. But, then Oceania has a look to it....

Now I'm fighting the polymesh that the whole arena topography is built from. The 4 cardinal directions carve and shape like butter rendering the best looking shapes. The bias off those cardinals is a PITA to make look good and a slight angle off a bias can make the most effective topo shaping tool in the terrain editor almost useless. In effect I end up having to lay down blobs of terrain larger and rougher than the finished shape and manually carve it all down. The tool I want to use ends up creating textured surfaces something like the micro terrain pictures I posted.

So here is today's problem, this elevation is 12,000ft and I have to sculpt a mountain range upthrust by a tectonic separation pushing away from a giant crack. That smooth sloped area if it was not on a bias to the polymesh cardinal directions would be simple to shape the runoff canyons from the higher elevations. Since it is on an off bias, I get to finger paint in 3D......YaY for me.....








Here is some perspective. I'm just starting to build that rift valley in the lower right corner which runs all the way to the central pond. These exist in the real world and I'm using the Great Rift Valley in East Africa to model my topographical features. And you can visualize how those step mesas will fill in the boarder of the map and a logical source for the runoff to feed all those streams in the low lands. Those short unfinished runs of the step mesas are so I can create the top of that rift valley. In a few weeks I'll be cutting the canyons for those runoff into the green and tan spotted areas that are 5,000ft after finishing running the step mesas completely around the map boarder. The rest of those bands are 3000, 2000, 1000, and 500. That is not the finished paint job for the terrain, it's just elevation bands so I keep my scale perspective in place.

[bustr]

You have got to love the bulldozer tool. You can set it from 660ft up to 6miles miles wide and pull it for hundreds of miles across your terrain, or a few feet to encourage a texture to take place and become a small hill with a canyon. You can use it in conjunction with your map.bmp to rapidly create land mass and building blocks for mountains.

I couldn't get the feel of the transition right no matter how much I pulled up mountain runoff canyons with a raise land tool. So I doodled with the bulldozer and pulled a line from a 3000ft hole I set into the 5000ft highland 25 miles to a 2700ft deep hole to cut a new face in the 5000ft highland that the mountain range canyons would run off into. That created a logical and visually better transition.

So Dundee's step mesas at the top of the new rift valley and the new transition I cut. For a reference, they are about 4000ft high. Visually vertical scale is a bit strange in the terrain editor.


 


You can see I continued the new cut almost 100 miles along the runoff bottom of the mountain range I'm building. You can imagine all the sculpting I have to do for about 200miles of mountain range from that small bit of the top of the valley.

[bustr]

Came up with a sculpting solution to the off bias angle of the terrain orientation for this mountain range. The underlying polygon mesh has good directions and bad directions. Everything ends up being a test to discover a good tool and technique for the location you are building.