Mapping Tutorial: Terrain

[DW_Ant]

This is a tutorial for designing terrains. You can visit my site for more tutorials or see images for this tutorial. http://www3.jjc.edu/WDC08/eeberhart/Web ... rrain.html

Assemble Terrain
You should build your terrain before placing Static Meshes in your map.
Build a big cube with dimensions ranging from 25,000 to 50,000. Place a Zone Info in your box. Open the Zone Info’s properties, and set bterrainzone to true.

This will tell the engine that this Zone will render the Terrain. Now click on the terrain editor tool, at the right side of the editor.

A window will appear. The close button doesn’t appear in the corner, like a usual window. To close this window, you must click on the camera button (Camera Movement) to close this window located at the very upper right hand corner.

To spawn a terrain info actor, you must click on the new terrain info button. It appears as a sheet of paper in the corner of the window.

For package, you must type in mylevel, as you would to creating Static Meshes. For group, you can type in something to your desire. I usually keep it as terrain. For name, I would give this terrain that’ll describe what this terrain will be. For this map, I’ll call it snow.
X size and Y size is the tricky part. At default, I like to leave as 256X256 for a 50k box, but you are allowed to make changes. Make sure that the numbers are in power of two. 64X64 is okay. 124X124 is not, 128X128 is good, 125X125 is bad, 512X512 (A really BIG level) is good, 5X5 is bad, and 8X8 (small) is good. Do you see a pattern? You can leave the height the same as default.

Hit okay, and click on the Camera Movement button to get rid of the window. Now, move your camera to have your terrain in view, but you don’t see it, yet. To see if you got your terrain running, go to wireframe mode to view your terrain. If you still don’t see it, hit build all. If you still don’t see it, hit T to toggle visibility of terrain.

This terrain is smaller than the level. You have two choices to make it bigger. You can either delete your terrain then build a new one with larger dimensions (this method will be more detailed, but it’ll reduce your frame rate during combat), or you can open the terrain properties then enlarge your dimension’s size (Less detailed but more optimizied).

The terrain properties
Property name Description

Inverted--------- Flips the terrain upside down. Useful if you’re building a cavern or something.

Layers----------- Applies one or more textures. Just like ogres and onions, textures will stack on each other to form a nice mixture of textures.

TerrainScale----- As seen previously, determines the size of all triangles that makes up the terrain.


Applying First Textures
Open the texture browser. Select a texture to your desire. Once you selected your texture, activate the terrain tool (Not your terrain info actor) to apply your texture.
Go to the layers tab and select the first layer. Click on new to create your first texture.

At the new window, the package must be mylevel, again. Group can be of your choosing. I’ll do terrain, again. For name, it can be your choosing. I’ll name it snow2, to match with my terrain’s name. Alpha height and width I leave alone. For your first texture, the alpha fill should be pure white. Making this white will fill in your terrain completely with your base texture. Color fill should be left alone. U and V scale determines how big one tile is for your texture. This can be in any value greater than 1. 1 means normal size. 4 equals it’s four times larger. Hit okay when you are set.

Now your terrain should be visible using any mode. If you don’t see it still, hit T to toggle terrain visibility.

If you still don’t see it that means you chosen a texture that is not meant for terrain. Delete your first layer, then choose a different texture and build a new layer.

Edit Vertices
This is my favorite part of terrain editing. This is the part where you make your terrain a---well a---terrain. Vertex editing enables you to add slopes ranging from flat surfaces to steep cliffs. Lets take a look at the terrain tool.
Once you open that thing, you should see two rings your cursor when you hover over your selected terrain.

These inner/outer rings can be adjusted with the window that pops up all the time. The inner radius is where you can manipulate the vertices with maximum strength. The outer ring will adjust the vertices with varied strength. Basically, the closer the center of the rings, the stronger the manipulation is. Finally, the last option is strength. Strength determines the sensitivity of your adjustments.

Be sure to save your map before you begin vertex editing. Just in case you screw up. If you mess up, you can click on the undo button on the terrain window (next to strength option), however the undo button is not dependable. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. Just to be safe, you should save your map. Whenever a catastrophe happens, you can simply reload your map.

Now, lets get started. Make adjustments to your inner and outer radius to your desire. Hold Ctrl and the right mouse button. Now drag the mouse until the section is selected.

For the magic to happen, move your vertices either up or down by holding Ctrl, right, and left mouse button then drag the mouse either up or down (the same way as if you were moving an actor up or down).

Congratulations!!! You finally manipulated your first terrain. Take some time to get the hang of the controls. Feel free to move on and manipulate other sections of your terrain. I’ll do the same. If you feel like you’re ready to learn some more tools, keep reading, but get use to of making simple hills and valleys so life will be easy for you in the long run. You can try using the paint tool, too. Instead of selecting everything, the terrain will move up & down with a stroke of your mouse.

Lets take a look at the other tools. During my construction, I made an error, and I have difficulty to undo my moves. My snowy hills are a bit steep. I don’t think snow can form slopes about 80 feet tall.

The Smoothing tool should help me out. The smoothing tool is a bit self-explanatory. It makes the terrain smooth, again. This is handy if you want to get rid of sharp edges, or hills that are difficult to flatten using the vertex editing. If I Hold the ctrl button and right mouse button, then the tool will do all the work for me. If nothing is happening, then you should restart your editor. It’s a small bug that I’m guessing that working with layers will trigger this, but I do know that restarting the editor will correct this problem.

The terrain is automatically smoothened out. If I wanted to start completely over in that section, I could use the flatten tool that’ll instantaneously make my terrain completely flat within my rings. Be sure you start from the normal leveled terrain, and then move to your hills.

Now I can go to vertex editing to make my second attempt in that corner. I’ll also use the smoothing tool to get rid of the sudden jump in the terrain after using the flatten tool.

You can do just the opposite of smoothing your terrain. Using the noise tool will roughen up your terrain for rocky surfaces & such. Avoid too much noise. It's a bit tough to walk on your terrain, knowing that you'll have to jump over a slight slope every 2 seconds. Also noise screws up the collision for Monster Mash. When you have too much noise, monsters have good potential in falling through your terrain. Keep the noise at the minimum.

If you applied too much noise, you can always undo it by using the smooth tool.

Adding Layers
I can proudly type, you are allowed to add multiple textures on one terrain. The terrain is flexible in placing many, many textures. I think you can add up to 32 layers, meaning you can have 32 different types of textures on one terrain.
Where did the name come from? When you are applying layers, you are literately stacking textures on top of each other. The first layer is your base texture you should already have one. Now what you are going to do is add a layer that’ll cover up your first layer. Then the third layer will cover up the first and the second layer. So on and so on…
Before you begin adding layers, you must select a texture.
To assemble your second layer, open your terrain editing tool (not the terrain info actor). Go to the layers tab.

Select the next blank space beneath your first layer. Then, click on new. This window should be familiar. Package must be mylevel (like always). Group should match your other layer’s group (to keep organized), but it could be any name you want, but the name must be different than your other names. Alpha height/width, leave that alone, again. Alpha fill is different. Before, you read that you should leave this pure white (all colors). Making it white will tell the engine to fill your entire terrain with that texture. So if we make it completely dark (no colors), it should not affect the terrain until you applied the texture.
White equals completely filling the terrain
Dark equals not filling the terrain at all.
U & V scale determines the size of one tile; again, 1 is normal size while 4 yields four times larger.

Click on ok; at this point, nothing should have happened to your terrain. It should look the same. If you see your new texture now, then you forgot to change the alpha fill color to black.
Now lets add a patch to our terrain. Be sure you have layer 2 selected. Now go to the Painting Tool.

If you didn’t select your layer, the paint tool will act like a vertex editor without having to select the areas. It’ll automatically adjust the vertices. Also it’s very sensitive to a point where you can cast giant hills in small strokes.

Just to make life easier, make sure you have your layer selected. Now for the fun part; hold down Ctrl and the left mouse button. Then you should see your layer appear.

Holding down Ctrl and the right mouse button will remove the textures only for the selected layer. It will not affect your base terrain until that layer is selected.

Sometimes, you make errors that you made the tiles too small & it's noticable to see the repeating textures.

It’s possible by opening your terrain info actor’s properties. Go to the terrain category. Click on layers to display all the layers. Go to the layer that holds the small texture. Now that the layer’s properties are displayed, you can make adjustments here. For this situation, I’ll make the texture larger by changing my U and V scale to a larger number than before.

One last thing I would like to point out. You are allowed to make specific sections of the terrain to be invisible (not rendered). This is useful when you need to optimize your level, or if your level is in an odd shape (other than a box). That is where invisibility comes in. Go to your terrain tool, and activate the visibility function.

The visibility function is easy to control. Simply, hold Ctrl and right mouse button to make the sections invisible. Hold Ctrl and left mouse button to make the sections visible, again.

I’ll leave it to you to discover other features the terrain tool offers. Welcome to a new world of mapping for nice outside levels. If you feel like something is missing in this tutorial, or you need help understanding something, feel free to add on to this tutorial.

[superchav]

N1, for some who dont understand the Common screenshot sorta way of doing it...
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_home.php

Has video training under Uneal Tech then Terrain Editing

Find this very useful as the ss method is kinda boring :P

[MONKEYSPUNK]

Nice one D2Boss! This is( from having no mapping experience what so ever) a great guide to help a noob like me out, in what seems a very complicated world called 'mapping'. Video tutorials are good in their own right but i prefer following instructions from a hard copy, rather than having to flick between computer screens. I was brought up in the era where the home computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 so tutorials about complex matters (map making software) for me, need to be written out and fed to me in layman's terms.
Yours does exactly what it says on the tin. Brilliant! :cheers: