Outdoor / Forest Area Modules

[demagogue]

I'm thinking about a set of modules for forest and outdoor areas and thought it'd be good to start a thread to discuss what would be good for such a set. We have a few outdoor things already, but I'm thinking more in terms of modules you can combine in different ways for a little more flexibility and variation. This is in analogy to indoor modules that let you create a room by combining parts, just for outdoor areas (and in contrast to simply modeling an entire outdoor area).

 

1. Tree Parts

So a few things I'm thinking. While we have a number of trees, one thing I liked that Thief did was you could make a cylinder brush, and then there were big branch models you'd add for branch cover, and it was both respectably convincing and very versatile in terms of picking the size and orientations you want. So the modules I'd think that would be good for that would be

 

- some branches tending on the massive size, with leaf alphas on them, mostly designed for sticking out of a trunk brush and providing a lot of overhead coverage, so a few of them could cover the entire area like a roof;

- some clumpy bulges and knots you could circle around the brush, particularly around the bottom, to break up the cylinder some and give it a natural look;

- some root bits that stick out of the ground;

 

2. Path/Road Parts

The other thing that'd be nice is longish line segments of hand-sized rocks you can mix around to make dirt path edges, to cover the seams between two brushes or patches with the path or road in the middle (another set could be made with bricks). For that I'm thinking about a variety of curves: in 30 degree increments, one set sharp curve, one set gradual curve, one of long-segments and another of short-segments, then another set with z-axis inclinations at points along the segment or curve. This would allow mappers to just line up the segments freely to make a path as they're building, and then build the landscape around it.

 

3. Walls and Fences

I think we could use a few walls and fences that are more fit for villages, farmlands, forests, and rural areas, like wooden fences and round stone walls.

 

4. Hidden Walls

The other kind of wall is more like a "natural wall" that, from a mapping perspective, can serve as a wall for portalling purposes but still give the impression of being in a continuous outdoors... So like a wall of brush or an earthen bluff or wall, or anything that looks outdoorsy that can cover a brush wall and close a leaf.

 

5. Landscapes

Aside from that, I'm also generally thinking about special kinds of landscape elements that you can't do with patches well, like bluffs (a drop-off of earth that you can use to connect two earth patches, good for, e.g., sticking a tree on top of with its roots sticking out. This would include the drop off threshold and the walls of the bluff), and the kind of parts for special features, like drop offs around ponds, etc.

 

6. Farmland

Patches of plowed farmland you can knit together to make a whole field, then crops to put in the fields (e.g., with the seed system), especially something like wheat and corn that really fills the area and would be fun to walk through, serve as a hiding spot, and to hide things in.

 

That's what I've thought about so far. My modeling isn't so great, but I'm thinking over the long term and for now wanted to have some discussion about it. That said, I have been working on a forest-y map and these are some of the things I've been thinking about that would be nice to have working on it.

[Sotha]

I've built some outdoors areas, and I felt that it would be nice to have convincing-looking large bushes. The kind of bush you line up between the ground and the skybox wall, as presented in both Ulysses missions.

 

An organic line of bushes is the easiest way to mask the fact that an outdoor area in idtech4 is just another room, but with terrain ground and skybox walls and ceiling.

 

The other big obstacle in building good looking outdoors area is texture blending. The mapper faces the work flow of i) make terrain, ii) make texture blend tricks for the terrain patch, iii) export .ase, iv) reimport the model, v) repeat iterations to make it look good, vi) repeat for each texture blend variation (grass-to-road, grass-to-rock, etc.)

 

Very tedious. I wonder if a set of terrain pieces that would fit together would help. Getting the texture seams fixed between the module pieces nullifies benefits, unfortunately.

[Bikerdude]

An organic line of bushes is the easiest way to mask the fact that an outdoor area in idtech4 is just another room, but with terrain ground and skybox walls and ceiling.

Look at what I did for the forest area in Alberics curse.....

[Sotha]

Look at what I did for the forest area in Alberics curse.....

Could you please summarize your method, briefly, here?

[Bikerdude]

Yuppers -

1. I created 3 large area's seperatated by two an off-sightline hole, placing a VP and FP in said hole.
2. all of the sky walls and ceiling were caulk, and a small skyportal brush was placed just below the ceiling brush in each area.
3. I then created patches in each zone using Fidcals dirt patch for the path between each zone - (we can now create single blended patch now though)
4. I than placed 1-3 of the large LOD tree entity models (the ones with the moving braches/leaves).
5. I then placed various sizes of rocks models around the edges of each area/zones, taking care to vary position/rotation to provide as much randomness as possible.
6. I then started placing a mixture of deciduous and evergreen treas, and bushes between and around the large trees and all the rocks I had previously placed - applying LOD args to everything.
7. I then placed moonbeam patches between all the gaps in the large/medium sized tree's, and Func_emitters with moon dust under those.
8. I then place random firing speakers through-out, varying the shader user as I go.
9. I then created either ponds or patched of shrubs in all the dips and hollows.
10. I then imported the fireflys from DRAM original version of blackstone manor - this was a right PITA (which reminds me, need to create a prefab for mappers to use)
11. Than I started placing mission specific details, like the horse, camp fire and associated items.

From memory I believe in a nutshell that's what I would do now if I had to do it from scratch.

[demagogue]

I think my issue with our trees is that I want really massive trees, the kind you could carve a tunnel through the trunk. Big trees are good to serve as ends of the portaled entryways between leafs too (the other kind of leaf). But actually it's not the trees per se so much as I love a big leafy canopy towering over almost like a roof.

 

Re: bushes along the skybrush, the way I'm building, the rooms are linked at 'kiss points' so there's another room behind it, so it has to look ok passing between rooms. I'm thinking about really 'bramble' kind of wild bushes, not the hedgerow type. I was just playing Keepers of Infinity and Soul Tear did a good job with that style I thought. It's usually ok if the 'doorway' is covered enough to shield that you're passing through a skybrush anyway. Big rocks do the job too.

[Bikerdude]

Yeah the big tree model I used gives you that roof effect, and we have a much more massive tree that could be used to build a tunnel through, but we would need non-model version of it.

[demagogue]

I just want the big branches. The trunk I can do with brushes. I need some variety anyway since there's a whole forest of them.

 

Funny I just now saw a big ass tree in Accountant 2. Don't know if it's the same one, but I like it.

[Bikerdude]

thats the one down from the very largest, and the same as the one I used in Alberics curse.

[NeonsStyle]

Be nice if there was also a way to do large area low level vegetation, rather than having to place them one by one, lay in a large area 3d model of low level vegetation.

[grayman]

Read the SEED wiki pages.

[NeonsStyle]

Here's a nice sound for forest night. It's mp3, I can give u the ogg, I'm using it for my map if I can get it imported.

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/71512306/ambience_forest_at_night.mp3

[Dragofer]

Here's how you import it:

 

make sure the .ogg is at 44.1khz otherwise it won't play ingame

put the .ogg into your fan mission's sound -> ambience folder, create it if needed

 

in your sound folder, create a new text file and change the extension to .sndshd

open the .sndshd file (with notepad/text editor if it asks)

in the .sndshd file, copy paste this into it:

 

 

ColdWind
{
editor_displayFolder river/ambience

looping
sound/ambience/ColdWind.ogg

}

 

 

That's an example declaration for an ambient named ColdWind.ogg within a fan mission archive named river, so you'd need to change those for yourself.

When you restart DR, or if you don't want to restart DR then go to Files -> Reload Defs, it'll show up in the 'create speakers' list.

Edit: You'd need to make sure that DarkRadiant's Game settings, found by pressing P, are set to point to your fm archive, so Mod (fs_game) : darkmod/fms/river in my case.

Edited June 30, 2016 by Dragofer

[NeonsStyle]

Thankyou Dragofer, that's exactly what I need.

[Petike the Taffer]

I especially like the bluff and road model prefabs ideas. Sotha's made some good points about filling gaps in bush and bush-like foliage variety.

 

Personally, I wouldn't mind something like a "surrounding forest" or "distant forest" type of skybox or background texture. Whether the skybox or texture should be static or maybe slightly dynamic/animated, I'm not entirely sure of. Depends on the capabilities of idTech 4 and on the result not coming across as too artiifical.

 

From what I remember, Reap as You Sow is one FM with a rather convincing outdoor environment surrounding the estate the mission takes place in, even though the skybox with mountains looks a bit forced compared to the rest of the outside scenery.

[demagogue]

I've been working on a forest over the last few months so I have even more experience with it now than I did then.

 

I think even then I had the basic paradigm down though. The way that's working for me is making a really big & tall box (like 30-40 meter square or so), polygonize it to a cylinder with like 9 sides or so, stretch it oblong. Then cut out one of the walls and that's a contact point that kisses the next cylinder over, and you stick a portal over the kiss point. The top 2/3 or 3/4 of it is skybrush, and if you have trees, it actually hides a lot of the skybox so you can cheat some -- e.g., you can have tree trunks that cover the kiss point kinks (otherwise you get an unnatural looking kinks that can also be dmapping trouble), then the top of the trunks can be like skybox cylinders that go higher than the top of the tree but still cover the kinds, but it's not really noticible (if you were looking through the kiss point) because the canopy largely covers it up any visual quirks (like skybox covering trees in the other area).

 

What I'm trying to perfect is the bottom 1/4 of it. I'm thinking about a thick brush object that matches a brush decal over the bottom half, so if you're looking through it it just looks like brush going back into darkness, with a tangle of brush (decal) that mixes into the skybox at the back. Right now I just have it as a texture and it looks good already except for the top seam is too sharp.

 

Aside from that basic structure, there's a lot of freedom to vary the z-axis with ravines, hills, bluffs, ascents & descents, bridges, etc, and technically you can cut gaps in the top part of the skybox if you wanted some treetop travelling action (not really my focus though).

 

Since my FM is also in the mountains, I'm also working on the forest area connecting to a mountain slope. The catch is making the side-wall (against the skybox) that goes up with the slope that isn't unnatural looking. I think I'll need to use big boulders.

[Bikerdude]

Got some WIp shots fella..?

[demagogue]

I'll do that when they're ready, but not quite there yet.