Need tips on faster displacements

Discussion in 'Mapping' started by flatmush, Jan 15, 2008.

  1. flatmush

    flatmush Member

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    Basically I have a map idea that I want to create, which is this:
    [​IMG]

    The problem is that it requires lots of displacements and I can't seem to find a way to manage that many displacements or get them done quickly.
    Does anybody have any hints/tips at creating terrain faster?

    For example I was wondering, can you make some flat terrain using brushes or will that always look wrong for grass, etc?
    And is it possible to make displacements out of lots of differently sized brushes without the displacement grids all being different sizes?
     
  2. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    I make a few different bits of cliff face, place them in a sequence, then sew them all together at the end.

    It's faster than doing it all individually, but it doesn't look as good as fully bespoke terrain for all areas, which is how you should do it if you want to be good at mapping.
     
  3. Bleeding Internet

    Bleeding Internet Member

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    Nah, I believe the grids have to line up size-wise, I think the best you could do there would be to roughly squish them together with the displacement offset thingamajiger-tool (I believe that is what VALVe did in Half-Life 2 to connect ground displacements to cliff displacements at the cliffs' bottoms)
     
  4. grayclay88

    grayclay88 Banned

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    I just need to know how to add more vertices to a displacement.

    How is this done?
     
  5. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Increase the power, it only goes up to four though.
     
  6. ScardyBob

    ScardyBob Member

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    Just reviving this thread because I've been using this tutorial to quickly create large amounts of displacements in Hammer. The basic idea is this

    1. Create a heightmap (in a program such as paint or photoshop)
    2. Create a vmf using DispGen
    3. Load it up in Hammer and fine tune the displacements

    Depending on how detailed you want to make your heightmap, you can get some pretty fancy displacement terrains pretty quickly.
     
  7. DrummerX

    DrummerX Empires Tyrant

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    DUDE, scardyBob you are new favoritve friend, been looking for something like this for hammer, been useing one similar to this for UT for years.

    OMG, scardy man, YOU ARE AWESOME
     
  8. Silk

    Silk Mapper

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  9. bitchslap

    bitchslap Member

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    lol

    same tutorial
     
  10. Caelo

    Caelo Member

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    then you should have looked at the "third party tools"-section of the valve developer wiki

    http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Third_Party_Tools

    Bryce is a tool to create realistic environments like mountains and lakes and it generates heightmaps for every mountain, hill or whatever you want...

    you can also edit the heightmaps and see in realtime what effect it has on the mountain...
    http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/software/bryce/
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2008
  11. ScardyBob

    ScardyBob Member

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    Cool! But paint is free :)
     
  12. arklansman

    arklansman Member

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    Use Gimp foooooooooooooooooool. ;p
     
  13. ScardyBob

    ScardyBob Member

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    lol, I do use Gimp, but only if I can't do it in paint first :)
     
  14. BumGravy

    BumGravy Member

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    I prefer Paint.NET to Gimp, its free, small download and doesnt run in a clusterfuck of windows like gimp does. Has better alpha support which is handy for source textures too.
     
  15. BumGravy

    BumGravy Member

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    Wow ive just been using this technique with pretty fast and impressive results. I used terragen to get my heightmap but for some reason it wouldn't export the heightmap to BMP or anything useabe, so i just printscreened and pasted into paint for editing :)

    I found that you can make a heightmap with completely black areas for the places you want to be buildable - if you make it pure black it will translate to a low, completely flat area when you get your displacements, perfect for building on. You can then just make the rest of the heightmap usual greyscale to create your hills, with your heighest areas around the outside.

    The result will be nice smooth hills surrounding a nice flat buildable area, with impassible terrain around the outside to seal your map.

    Hopefully in the next few days i willhave tweaked a finished map using this technique, but I am also trying to get plunge_b2 finished :)
     
  16. bitchslap

    bitchslap Member

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    woot plunge b2!!
     
  17. Caelo

    Caelo Member

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    true but there are some other ways to obtain bryce... ;)

    I'm not going to tell how but I guess you can figure it out :P
     
  18. -Mayama-

    -Mayama- MANLY MAN BITCH

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    Prostitution?
     
  19. Sandbag

    Sandbag Member

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  20. BumGravy

    BumGravy Member

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    Just looks like a slightly bump displacement :/ any better pics?
     

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