yeah, i'm going to try to finish it for real. i was saving it for qexpo, but i don't think there's enough interest this year. 

Yeah atm just lighting big stuff with a sunlight + ambient. When basic geometry is finished will then switch off the ambient, dim the sun and put in torches and such.

The ruins one I was actually thinking about VIS when setting it out so for the most part it works okay. The only problem is the lake of slime just suddenly stopping at the edge, but nothing I can really do about that. 

Also Necros what grid size were you generally laying out your brushes for terrain there?

I still can't get the hang of terrain at all :( 

16. for the super far away stuff along the edges, you can maybe get away with 64, but if you do too much 64, you can tell even when it's far away-- things just look very coarse and mechanical.
so you should remember to occasionally put in minute details even on far away terrain to make sure that it doesn't look like 'far away' terrain.

for making tri-souped terrain in general;

if you don't have the patience to do it by hand, you can always give a terrain generator a try. of course, that has it's own problems as you now have to make a height map image for the generator to use, and that's an art in it's own right. or you can use a fancy generator like the one in bryce to get access to crazy cool fractal generators and erosion and such and then export the height map and plug it into the generator.
my beef with terrain generators is that they will output the trisouping in a uniform manner irregardless of terrain features.
this makes things a little less efficient (smooth areas can be made with larger brushes, but a generator will just make a lot of brushes with small height differences) and if you're trying to make specific things like cliffs and such, you'll have to tear out the generated brushes and rebuild it which sort of defeats the purpose of generating in the first place.

if you want to do it by hand, first, make sure you actually have the patience. it's very long and can get boring.

next, depending on the type of terrain you're going to make, you should lay out the 'key points' in the terrain first and work out the height differences.
so make all your peaks first, even if they are a single brush.

then you'll want to lay down the player path next.

finally, you just connect everything together while trying to make it look interesting. this is the long and potentially boring part.

it helps playing games that use outdoor terrain a lot. it can keep you stoked about your own terrain and stop you from burning out whilst working on it. lucky i got borderlands. ^_^; 

Make your brushes triangles (two triangles per one square on the grid) and play with their vertices accordingly?

not-a-mapper talking, so feel free to disregard. 

 

one tip i have to speed things up:

when you copy and paste the current triangle, instead of rearranging each vertex to fit onto the last, mirror the brush in both x and y axis. you can now match up any line on the triangle to the opposite line of the previous triangle (that you copied from). this means you only have to modify a single vertex instead of 3. speeds things up a lot. 

make a bunch of triangles (maybe if I'm feelin' frisky, say 12) then I arrange them in the top-down view, then I start moving the edges up and down by using the handle between the two vertically aligned vertexes on one vertical edge of each prism. Yeah it takes a while, but put some good tunes on while you are doing it and it becomes easier. Or the TV on in the background. Or both ;) 

 

 

slide that brush in there... oh yeah, align those vertices, align them good! 

time to apply some caulk 

Thanks for the feedback.

@Ricky: I'm eager to light it as well, but I'm gonna finish up all the brushwork before moving on to entities. I'd say I'm about halfway finished with architecure and layout, so lighting won't commence for a while unfortunately!

@Shambler: Thanks, I'll see what I can do about the ramp. 

I was more just curious about what general sizes he was going for. Cause you could spend ages with a tiny grid size and shitloads of brushes :p 

Brush size too I guess 

 

s'not what I heard :( 

and then you cry afterwards for like a week 

leaking 

those shots look great, Bernsten. Seriously awesome!

I agree with shambler regarding the ramp, although it would probably be markedly less noticable depending how you light it.
Also, that's exactly the kind of architecture which is a pain in the ass to properly execute...
what editor are you using, anyway?

Do many other people here build and light seperately? I tend to do so, but I don't really take the time to light areas well - I imagine many of you light as you go... true? 

the pipes on the left in the 2nd shot might benefit from being the grainless cop texture, or something,instead of the grainless beige base texture. IMHO! 

You dont want to make them too small. I would make them maybe 128x64 or bigger for steep parts, or for example maybe up to 256x256, maybe 128x128 or whatever for more open parts. But you might have parts where you go quite a lot smaller if required, or if doing something really big them you could go bigger. Im just throwing some very vague figures on the table. But doing it 64x64 or smaller is going to be a real pain in the ass if you are doing a large are like that. 

doing a large area like that. 

Lighting and architectural should go hand in hand... in other words building lighting features into the architecture. That way you can get some really cool effects, instead of just adding lighting in as the afterthought. 

I'm using QuArK.

I might start lighting everything I've made up until now, actually. It'd probably be great for motivation to finish up areas as they will look in the final compile, seeing as I've had some trouble with motivation recently...

Probably would be a good idea to light it room by room, I guess.
Anybody know if there's a cordon function in QuArK as there is in Hammer? I guess I could just hide everything but a single room and seal it off with a few brushes though.