Mountains/Hills and whatnot

[MC]

How do you go about making terrain features such as mountains or hills? The idea of how I think I should go about making it is that I first create the top of a mountain/hill/whatever like this:

<IMG SRC="http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/5666/1jo7.jpg">

Then I create triangle brushes around the edges:

<IMG SRC="http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/1028/2tf4.jpg">

After that, I just manipulate the verticles to my chosing... So am I on the ball so far or do I look like I don't know what I'm doing?

 

[donnierisk]

You're doing okay, but that's the wrong thing to do, here's what I do:

I make a brush that fills th whole gridsize ONLY from the topview and press enter, then it will be across the whole map horizontally, but vertically it's pretty thin.

Next I select the brush and cut it up into 16 pieces, then I cut each of those pieces up into 4 equal sized brushes.

Then I cut triangles out of that in a X pattern, I'll post a pic later to show you the end result, after all of this I have a face count of 640, so you have enough to do other stuff too, oh and as for the null texture, I select all the triangles, then go into texture toolbar, then I deselect all the faces that you'll see in-game and then apply null to the rest.

After I made the terrain I select everything and then mvoe it 128 units away from the end and I make a skybox in the remaining 64, so then it's 64 units away from the grid's end.

Well that's a long story, hope it's correct ^^

 

[Cold Steel]

*inserts more 1.3 content*

These are screenshots of the hfil map, which is still quite WIP. However this should give you an idea on how to make natural mountains/rock formations.

The first thing you do is outline an area, where you want the mountain/hill/rock formation. I usually do that by cutting that area out of the map i'm working on. Then I add triangles of all kinds of sizes, that all fit together in order to make mountains tops and such. After that, I go to my vertext manipulation tool, and I pull the vertices up in the way I like them. Just experiment around a bit. If you run into trouble, just post here again. I love to help out with terrain problems.

 

[MC]

Alright, I'll try both methods out.

Thanks for the replies.

 

[donnierisk]

:O CS?!?!?!?! What's your wpoly for that map? that's amzing but I'd get a wpoly of 1500 or so, sheesh you team mappers.

But yesh, MC that's an excellent example of what terrain should look like!
But he is using a technique where he makes a 2048 X 2048 texrure and then makes the terrain fit, to make cliffs just make a more vertical hill then usual and apply a cliff texture.

 

[Cold Steel]

The same principle goes for normal texturing.

Try to make benefit of good textures too, they can make low poly mountains look really nice.