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Creating Terrains - Great Expectations |
Page 3 of 7 |
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With a solid understanding of how the DotProduct2 shaders work it is finally time
to create some terrain. Probably the first thing to try is just a few simply square
brushes in a boxmap.
If the shaders and textures are working correctly, the boxmap will have a few brushes
in the center which look very ordinary and have no / little alpha blending happening. This
is probably not what you are expecting.
But as you will soon find out flat square brushes do nothing with this system. The shape of
the terrain has to undulate in order for the DotProduct2 to change the alpha blends values.
This does in a way force the terrain to be created out of interesting shapes and not
flat square brushes!
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The next test map needs to have undulating brushwork and not simple flat blocks.
The brushwork can be any size or shape, but sometimes it is easier to start
with a rough grid of squares and add / change the odd shapes as when you need them.
The brushwork in the picture to the left was creating using a template system. This was
discussed in a previous article called Rockwall Corridor
and is highly recommended reading if you want to follow the rest of this article.
Once the brushwork template has been created, simply duplicate the brushwork and
shear the new version left / right / up / down depending on how much variety is
required.
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Once the map is compiled its time to look at the end result in game and unfortunately its not
what is expected. The ditch floor has very little definition and the whole lump of terrain
seems to be one continuous texture!
What could be changed ... the alpha channel on the secondary texture? ... DotProduct2
parameters? ... the brushwork to a more agreeable compiler shape?
Changing the alpha channel might help but not enough to give the base of the ditch
any good definition.
Any changes to the DotProduct2 parameters will affect the whole terrain. High / Low values
(0.0-0.7, 0.9-1.0) produce very little blending and the values in between are just long
blends with no defined edges.
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With the addition of the alpha fade brushes and some tweaking of the ditch brushwork the lower
area is well defined and the grass grows nicely across both banks.
Changing the alpha channel or DotProduct2 parameters will not produce better results than
manual tweaking of the terrain alpha by hand.
Adding more triangles to define the terrain shape might work with the existing system,
but FPS issues have to be considered and construction shouldn't be overly complex.
Using the DotProduct2 system to generate the first pass and the Alpha Fade brushes to fine
tune the terrain afterwards is a perfect solution as the image to the left shows.
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