Natural environments?

[Kory]

What is the "normal" way that natural environments are tackled with GTK for Q3? I need to make a playing field, some mountains, cliffs, and some trenches. Some of the features need to be quite large, but not blocky.

My first attempt was to make large patches as cliffs and use another patch for the groundplane, but after having a few pile up, the map wouldn't build.

My next attempt was to use a more simple patch for the groundplane, and very simple patches for the cliffs. This would build, but looked rather rough.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
-Kory

[dONKEY]

Every time now I would say model it and import as an ase. The process takes longer but the creation of the natural feature is easier and quicker. Use brushes for the map hull and any man made geometry.

[Chretien]

you need to make solid brushes underneath your patches with 'caulk' on them, because patches doesn't close out the void.

[themuffinman]

Learn how to create terrain from the master himself:

http://www.simonoc.com/pages/articles/terrain1_1.htm

[Kory]

Thanks for the replies.. I kind of feel like a dumbass, after seeing the documentation that is included with GTK.. I didn't realize that there was so much there..

Anyway, I really like the idea of building terrain using Maya..I only have Maya 5.0 and can't seem to find an .ase exporter for anything older that 6.5. Anyone know of a way to do it with 5.0?

When an .ase model is used like this, where is it textured? My hopes here would be that I could use a blend shader with some sort of masking map to apply the shaders to. I used to use a B&W Photoshop image at 1024x1024 and could apply a shader to each color in Maya. Reading the tutorial that is included with GTK led me to believe that I clould use a texture for each of the palettized colors.. 256?? That seems like way too much freedom, I probably read something wrong!

I am going to check out the tut referred to above, and see what kind of results I get. The biggest issue that I am having right now is setting up a "sun" and getting the ambient lighting to be anything but black. I am dropping 50-100 lights just to light a map enough to walk around. I have to be doing something wrong here!

Thanks,
-Kory

[obsidian]

Read sock's dotproduct tutorial above. The tutorial uses brushes for the terrain but the same technique applies to model meshes as well.

You can use the old metashader technique like in the manual, but it's an antiquated method of doing it. The Q3Map2 terrain method in sock's tutorial is much easier and more flexible.

What formats does Maya export to? Maybe you can export to something for Blender and use that to export to .ase? If you can save it as a file that I can open in 3ds Max, I could export it to .ase for you.

Regarding suns: most sun lighting is done though a shader...
http://robotrenegade.com/q3map2/docs/sh ... aders.html