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Old 14th March 2014, 12:21 PM   #1
Stiglr
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Default Suggestions on how to....

I may be about to embark upon an entirely different kind of project, for me: topographic terrain creation.

That's as wildly different from aircraft and vehicle building as it can get. One's technical and mechanical, the other organic and random.

So... what's the best way to approach this? I'll be working from a flat map of an area with hints as to varying contour levels (it's a board wargame map). With the hexagonal overlay, I'll have a good solid distance scale for the X axis.

What's the best way to generate terrain from point to point, with some nice randomness? My first guess involves multiple levels of subdivisions... or perhaps some randomness or "noise" to get the effects I want?

Then... for trees and foliage: I'll have a few stands on farms and what-not, but will also need some copses and forests, of varying types of trees. What's the best way to approach this?

Buildings, farmhouses, stone walls and the like will be easy to contemplate.

Anyone with experience on this who can guide me?
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Old 2nd July 2014, 10:41 AM   #2
coldby
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Default Re: Suggestions on how to....

Sorry Stiglr, I've been away for a while (no, not at a lunatic asylum as you may think, it was a research asylum ).

When I run into a similar problem a few years ago, what I learned is:
1 - terrain:
- generate a square lattice large enough (I used 8x8 but the finer, the better)
- subdivide it once or twice (a matter of taste)
- select its vertices
- apply a moderate amount of noise to X and Z
- apply a larger amount of noise to Y
- adjust manually the points where you want your hills to be
- commit subdivision
- select all vertices
- apply a smaller amount of noise to Y (to provide some roughness)
- select the whole object and reduce it until it's of your liking (you don't want to have 64E10 triangles, do you?)
- the texture you apply is determinant to make it palatable.

2 - trees and bushes
- drawing them yourself is a pain in the neck and takes way longer then you expect if you want them to look natural, but you may find several pretty good (and free) ones on the web (try sharecg.com) in .obj format. Not all of them are decently textured but that's something you can take care of yourself.

3 - foliage
That's a huge headache and you risk ending up with incredibly large files unless you make intensive use of transparency and bump textures - 2 or 3 coarse shells around each tree, the rest to the texture. Even better if your final software can handle real displacement textures rather than just bump.

That's all for now, but let me know if you have a problem, I might have already bumped my head against it.

P.S.: if you don't find any decent ready-made trees just whistle, I should still have a couple of them in some corner of my HD.
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Old 2nd July 2014, 11:33 AM   #3
Stiglr
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Default Re: Suggestions on how to....

Thanks for those suggestions! Should I need to step in and help someone with this I'll feel I can approach it intelligently!!
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