[?] Terrain mapping

[the_ganman]

Im aware theres a bunch of different ways to do terrain, the brushes, heightmap pictures...etc

But i was wondering how you guys go about doing it. If you have a picture of the area you want to use do you greyscale it and use it? or do you go about with the brushes hand sizing everything?

Thanks

Ganman

[Rudd]

everyone has their own way of doing it tbh, no single method is superior

I like using DEM data then going over it with geocontrol 2 to get the right shapes then hand scultping to make it work well with bf2 (e.g. terrain morphing stuff)

Burning sands was done using a basic noise generation in terragen, forest fire (WiP) was also done that way but had the benefits of geocontrol also.

combining that with this method https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-m ... nment.html gets alot of work done very fast.

However some excellent maps were done with mainly hand sculpted terrain, I think Shija Valley is one - which is incredible.

I don't like hand sculpting from scratch because I feel its very obvious where I've done it, making it look unnatural, but other mapper made it work in their favour

L3DT is another program thats quite popular, Rhino for example likes that one.

[the_ganman]

Thanks rude,

Second question

When i try to paint on textures or even use tpaint

this is all i see

see attachement

any way i can not need to super zoom in close and be able to see what im doing?

Thanks

[Rudd]

you mean can you see the detailtextures at long range?

yeah there is a setting for that

terrain editor
textures (the option you use to paint on the ground)
on the left above 'layers' is 'general, click that
tweakbar, lodswitch distance, increase that value - it will not carry accross to ingame it only works in the editor

alternatively assign your lowdetail settings to each groundtexture, then you can see the distribution by where the low detailmap is painted (0 is no lowdetailtexture for smooth textures, 1 is for the majority of your map and 2 is for steep bits (asuming your using the conventional lowdetailtexture layouts))