wedge2211 Posted January 2, 2003 Share Posted January 2, 2003 I've noticed several realistic-looking terrains that seem to be composed of triangles in Radiant, like LDJ's imp_base map...how is this done? I've always had trouble making exterior areas... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth Link Posted January 2, 2003 Share Posted January 2, 2003 use GTK gensurf. this creates some really good looking terrain composed of triangles.to use it, go to the plugins section on GTK radiant. select Gensurf and floor, wall or ceiling. when the menu pops up select a type of terrain. valley, hill and what not. theres also a "from bitmap" option that uses heightmaps. im not so good about heightmaps but i can tell you that it uses pictures in shades of white to black to determine the height of the terrain Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Takeoffyouhoser Posted January 3, 2003 Share Posted January 3, 2003 The best thing to do is get GTK radiant. In the plugings section it has GENSURF. Its a pretty neat little program that Emon pointed me to. For your terrain, you need to make a heightmap. This is an 8 bit Grayscale BMP file. The darker the shade of gray, the lower the terrain, and the lighter, the higher. Its always best to start out with a middle gray color for a base. make sure the file is 33 pixels or 65 pixels too! I don't know why,but its what I was told. Type in "Heightmap" in a GOOGLE search, and you'll find some examples . Now , open up GTK radiant and go to plugins. Next, select Gensurf and then Ground Surface. here are the tabs and settings/ explanations for them "General" under game, make sure Quake 3 is selected under Orientation, click ground surface under Waveform, click from bitmap leave the other settings alone...... " Extents" This is where you plot your terrain on the editor grid. Its jsut like Geometry class, x y -X and -y . The divisions section is basically how in depth your terrain will be. Terrain is all triangular brushes, so the greater the divisions, the greater amount of trinagles, hence, the greater amount of detail! your divisions should be divisible by your corresponding extents as well for the terrain to be done effectivlely. so X division should be able to go into each x extent evenly. This goes the same for Y. * note* Terrain is very framerate intense, so try not to go too overboard. You can actually get a really nice sized terrain with a good amount of detail in game and not ahve much problems. leave the rest of the tags in extents be. *Bitmap* this is where you find your heightmap. It doesn['t ahve to be in any kind of directory specific to jedi Outcast. its all good Next, go down to the map color section, and make it looks like this. Map color 0 to 0 Map color 255 to 2048 Don't ask me on th number, i was told to do it this way. * Fix Points* I have no F'n clue what this box does at all. I have never used it or figured it out. i guess you can jsut look at your terrain move around with it. * Texture* make sure it looks like this...this is my texture setting for Imperial Brewery, you can use any texture you wish Surface Hoth/snow_01 Other System/caulk Steep leave this blank make sure use detail brush box is selected too! now, hit preview and you'll be able to see your terrain...in a greenish grid setting. finally, hit OK and watch it load in radiant!!!! *** I do have some screenshots of my forest bunker built into the terrain i can e-mail you if you like. If you have any other questions, E-mail me at Uptheirons@earthlink.net, and i can get back to you faster..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 3, 2003 Share Posted January 3, 2003 Why not just use Nem's Mega 3d terrain editor Thats what I use because you start of like a editing program with a floor then select the tools Eg. Mountain tool and twist the terrain how you like it and then just export it as a .map much easyer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emon Posted January 3, 2003 Share Posted January 3, 2003 Where would we get that? I've used EasyGen before, but never heard of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth Link Posted January 3, 2003 Share Posted January 3, 2003 where do you get easygen? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emon Posted January 3, 2003 Share Posted January 3, 2003 http://digilander.libero.it/ilbanca/files_easygen.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth Link Posted January 3, 2003 Share Posted January 3, 2003 thanks emon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Download this from http://countermap.counter-strike.net/Nemesis/terraintut.html and just so you know i always go here for anything I need for mapping it hasnt let me down yet http://www.planetwolfenstein.com/tramdesign/resources.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Takeoffyouhoser Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Hey Ook... Does this terrain editor make it easier to make higher terrains? like mountain ravines? I always seem to have a big problem with Gensurf in making big gorges. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Hell yer its really easy to use a really good editer you can do that and more Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wedge2211 Posted January 4, 2003 Author Share Posted January 4, 2003 I'd like to hear which people like better--EasyGen or this Nem's or Gtk's Gensurf... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leslie Judge Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Why? Try them and listen to yourself! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emon Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 This Nem's thing is actually for Half-Life, but if it's just exporting the basic MAP file with only the architecture, Radiant might be able to read it. Similar to how I like to plug my maps into QERadiant so that I can use the smart_train, then remove everything but that train and merge it into GTKRadiant again... GenSurf is great, it's easy and built into GTKRadiant as a plugin. This is a good one to use. EasyGen is made exclusivly for Q3, and will make the metashaders (they make it so you can blend texture together, like a smooth transition of grass to rock) and the MAP file of the terrain for you. However, some people haven't gotten the metashaders to work right in JO. They SHOULD work, because they work fine in SoF2. Perhaps it will work with Q3Map2, I don't know if anyone has tried that yet. Another option for metashaders would be to make the terrain the old fashioned way, all by hand, as shown in the Q3TA terrain guide that comes with GTKRadiant. It'll be tough, but it might work better. Ydnar also says there are better ways to do terrain in Q3Map2 besides the traditional stuff... I think pong shaded lightmaps is part of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wudan Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 At the very least, the maker of EasyGen knows of Q3Map2's existence, he switched his auto-generated shaders from using TcMod in the shaders to TcGen, on ydnar's suggestion. Unlike GTKRad and Q3Map2, there isn't any source for EasyGen available, but what it does is not completely impossible without EasyGen, EasyGen does it better, is all. If you were sick, you could get GTK's SDK and develop your own plug-in, but, you'd have to be sick. In discussion of 'terrain', you'll notice this is an issue Quake3 Mappers frequently come up against 'light-mapping' terrain and whatnot. What they're worried about is bot-navigation. Since in JK2, we manually make bot nav files, we don't worry about this, fyi. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 4, 2003 Share Posted January 4, 2003 Raident does read the 3d terrain gen when converted to .map and I know it was build for half life but when converted to .map all Q3 lvl editors reads it because the .maps are all the same be it from Q3 to SOF2 or even newer eg. UT 2003 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emon Posted January 5, 2003 Share Posted January 5, 2003 Er, no, there's no way that could work with UT2K3, it's a totally different engine. JO, SoF2, Q3A, Q3TA, F.A.K.K.2, Alice, MoH:AA, RtCW, EF and maybe a few others all run on the Q3 engine. Half-Life runs on a modified Quake I engine, so as long as the MAP format is the same as it is in Radiant, it will load the geometry (entities wouldn't work well). The MAP format for all the Quake games is probably nearly identicle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Takeoffyouhoser Posted January 5, 2003 Share Posted January 5, 2003 I'd like to hear which people like better--EasyGen or this Nem's or Gtk's Gensurf... I started using EasyGen , then went to Gensurf. The only reason I changed was the Gensurf was that its in Radiant as a plugin. the only thing I don't like was that my snowy terain looked rocky, so i used a Yavin texture and made a great looking forest.... Other than that, Gensurf gave me a great looking landscape, and i'll use it again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wudan Posted January 5, 2003 Share Posted January 5, 2003 You know, there's some great Q3Map2 Key words that I've been wanting to take a look at that should make for better snow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 6, 2003 Share Posted January 6, 2003 What do you mean ??? There is good snow out and ask MAD DAD for his snow .efx or ask him how he made it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wudan Posted January 6, 2003 Share Posted January 6, 2003 No, I mean Snow on the ground. And No, EFX files are not the way to go. He has 32+ in his big big map. I have already ported some coded snow for AOTC as a client side render only, so it doesn't cause lag. AlphaMod Q3Map2 has a number of shader keywords that enhance the appearance of terrain to make it look more natural. The pic I linked to uses a 'sand' texture combined with some kind of Q3map_alphamod keyword (could be q3map_alphagen, though) to place sand on surfaces facing upwards, (or whichever way you like) This was done, from what I can see, on RR2Do2's suggestion that this could be used to effectively add snow to a scene, that is, snow on the ground. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Takeoffyouhoser Posted January 6, 2003 Share Posted January 6, 2003 The only problem I had with the snowscape was that the triangles were too noticable for realistic snow. Not that I am doing my terrain over now, but, Wudan, would this technique you've found out make this problem go away ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 7, 2003 Share Posted January 7, 2003 Yes take Mad*Dads lvl you can see the triangls but other then that its a MAD lvl Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Takeoffyouhoser Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 http://sonkate.com/imperial_brewery/ the outdoor pics here were supposed to be snow, but i had to turn it to forest.... those lines in the triangles made the snowy ground look crappy... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ook_typhon Posted January 8, 2003 Share Posted January 8, 2003 Did you use EzyGen for that anyway looks cool look fward to playing it also are you going to make both SP and MP look good for a MP map Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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