How Long does a Terrain take?

[lunatic1]

I have just 1 question! Where do you come up with the names for these maps?  no disrespect intended.

[bustr]

My first one BowlMA I created a caldera with a 27,000ft rim and filled it with islands. It is a gigantic "bowl". My second one I was researching the pacific area of the Solomon islands, New Guinea and Borneo. On a chart of the area I looked at the region was called Oceania. My third one is using the North Africa\Mediterranean tile set. I wanted to do more than desert and low mountains. I was researching the east Africa Great Rift Valley for ideas, riftval.

[bustr]

The tile sets in the terrain editor have some tiles that show contrast better than other tiles when you are creating topo structures. The med tileset has a nice sandstone tile but, it blinds out in sunlight hiding the structure you are building. I use a light green low reflective tile so I can see what I'm doing without having to change the sun time to evening or dawn which casts too much shadow especially in deep narrow gorges.

You can see my initial shaping experiments in the NW top of the terrain.

[bustr]

Worked out the technique to rapidly shape these things.

[SilverZ06]

Do you get paid for all your hard work or are you just volunteering?

[AAIK]

Too long.

[bustr]

AAIK I've wondered if you shill for the competition, and what you are really trying to do is discourage me form having the fun I do building these terrains becasue they might help this company's market share even a little. All of your complaints have been a subtle attempt to stop me from building terrains becasue you have decided they take too long, they are not worth the effort, and some nebulous something won't turn out well for "whom"??

AAIK stop stalking and trolling me for building terrains, if you have a problem with me building terrains, send an e-mail to Hitech outlining your concerns. So far he has not had your concerns with my work.

[AAIK]

Ehhh, I was just commenting on HTC's tool lack of ease.

[Ciaphas]

Bustr, switch to decaf dude.

Good work on the terrain, this is the stuff I like watching get accomplished.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bustr]

I'm just documenting building a terrain, everyone else who has dropped bombs in here decided they didn't like what I was doing. Or tried to hijack my design to have me build their terrain without having to expend the effort themselves. These forums only being a few steps above 4chan at times controlled by the rule# and Skuzzy intervention, I've found the only method to deter them is a ten ton hammer named "Look Don't Touch". I did not make it that way, I've only been "documenting" building a terrain. If anyone really wants to communicate terrain building with me, they use the PM system. If it's done in the public posts, often much can be gotten away with including simply trying to throw a wet blanket on someone they don't like within the boundary's of the rule#.

So why do "they" have the impulsive urge to derail what I'm doing? This being the Internet, negative peer responses are supposed to effect you to help you not to want to go on. Since forums are peer and tribal driven. 


Back to what I was documenting.

The bulldozer tool is good for moving around the polymesh and has limitations when you need more than straight lines of material effected. Knowing what the smallest brush width is that will control one polygon will allow you to use the raise hill tool as a cutting or raising tool to rapidly shape compound shapes. Running the Smooth Catmul back through the area allows you to move through faster becasue it will clean up tiny inconsistencies.

This is about one sector of rapid carving with that tiny brush diameter in 15 minutes. The gorge runs another sector and then I will finish with the Smooth Catmul and make the brush 2x the diameter in the picture. Making it larger will magnify the effect and deform things in too uniform of an application. The smaller brush allows rapidly running across all the formations and controlling the amount of deformation. It helps to google rock formations like this to get a feel for how they weather and deform in the real world. The size of the terrain editor polygons limit making things look realistic to about this. Once you understand that limitation, it speeds up building topo features since you know when to stop and move on.

[bustr]

It's amazing how fast these canyons go if you planned ahead to how you lay down the base blocks and mapping them so they have very little wasted space from the final outcome. These kinds of canyons weather in a predictable manner becasue they are sandstone.

[bustr]

Sometimes I just cannot eyeball and free hand low ridges and water cut canyons. Drawing the primary ridge spine and water course solves that and saves time. Along with painting the work area in bites to work one at a time in a logical flow out of the canyon land. I was afraid it would turn out to be continuing the canyon cuts down into the runoff plain for the lakes. Coming back later I probably would have forgoten why I prepped what I marked. You have to finish things all the way to painting at every stage and worry about touch up as you lay in airfields and tank spawns. Otherwise you will have a whole bunch of monotone terrain features that really don't thematically make sense long after you spent the time creating them.

[100Coogn]

Someone please move this thread to the proper location.  It does not belong in "GENERAL DISCUSSION"
Thank you.

Coogan

[bustr]

Gee Coogan, what is more general to this game than the terrain, since you cannot have an arena without a terrain. I'm not hurting anyone documenting a terrain under construction that everyone will use eventually. All these years you were never curious what the players who built these things go through for your gamey happiness? Don't worry, this is till being documented in the terrain editor bucket for posterity.

Why don't you give an MA terrain a shot? You seem to have a lot of opinions about good game play and I'm freely giving the how to use the editor with all of this documentation. You just have to open it and start finger painting. One might think you are trying to have at least a token Pyrrhic victory by trying to personally influence a move of this posting. But, who would want to think that of you.....


I've reached that point that my finger painting is not there for the night. But, here is the why of mapping the ridge line and the canyon water run line.

[MajWoody]

Nice work bustr. Thanks for all your effort.