Creating unnatural shapes/brushes in DR

[brethren]

Hey guys -

 

OK, I've had one real problem since plunging into the world of TDM editing. There's times when I want to make very un-squareish shapes, such as a mountain or rocky incline, or possibly even a cave, or any other kind of natural geography. In dromed, I loved my dodecahedrons. What's the best way to go about creating similar shapes in DR?

 

For kicks, I opened up Mad's Mountain to try to get a feel for the cave system, but the info I saw within the editor was just confusing and unclear. I though it might be better to ask here and see what folks think. Is it done through patches? That's my guess but maybe you guys can tell me.

[nbohr1more]

Quick sloppy answer:

 

If I recall correctly, Mad's Mountain was built in Blender. That's why you don't see much in the map in DR.

 

The conventional method is to use patches ...(and if you want to get fancy export the patch work to Blender for vertex blend painting).

 

Check out the caves in NHAT 2, and Caduceus of St Alban for other examples.

[Shadowhide]

caves in NHAT 2

 

it just cylindric patch with dragged vertexes

 

read wiki about patches

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Serpentine]

I've been using Sculptris + MeshLab + my little exporter to make my cliffs and hedges, still have one bug to iron out and then I'll post a wiki writeup. It's extremely simple once you've got the idea. Making caves might be a bit more tricky, but if done in smaller sections might make it quite possible.

[Sotha]

I've been using Sculptris + MeshLab + my little exporter to make my cliffs and hedges, still have one bug to iron out and then I'll post a wiki writeup. It's extremely simple once you've got the idea. Making caves might be a bit more tricky, but if done in smaller sections might make it quite possible.

 

Using cylinders can be quite fast and simple to do caves. One cylinder is a cave segment, one other half-end capped cylinder is the cave end. These two are connected, and then you put a third cylinder between the two so that it hides the connection seam.

 

Like this:

 

See knightons manor, the tunnel in the cellar. That was really fast and easy to do and sill look decently good.

[ungoliant]

Sotha, I not like this method. Before any cave-shaping is done, i would create cylinder1, clone, place cylinder2 side-by-side with cylinder1 so the vertices match up, then both cylinders can be selected together, and the intersecting vertices can be adjusted together. there are other alternative methods for making Y-splits as well.

Also, to make just a big room connected to a corridor area, making a patch cylinder that has more verts than 3x3 (i.e. 3x5 for small area) can also mean you can use the purple verts to create hard-edges for openings in cave walls to larger areas and open up the remaining columns (or rows, however you made your patch) to make a big room directly connected to a smaller corridor in the same patch. cloning/mirroring/vertex-aligning can make things easier to make an adjacent cave area on the other side, with the adjacent verts still aligned and flush (with a little effort)

 

edit: sorry i'm not a big fan of trying to make 'seamless' areas by creating somewhat-natural-looking-but-not-flush-or-aligned-zones to connect areas. Maybe I'm just OCD or something but 6 months after graduating from A-Z tutorial i can no longer stand brush/patch verts that are misaligned/intersecting into eachother. And this is coming from a guy who prefers CSG-subtract over clipper tool, and the only other person i've seen with that same philosophy is shadowhide(ouch)

Edited February 28, 2011 by ungoliant

[Jesps]

Yup Mad's Mountain is a bunch of func_static Blender models. It was a very fast way to build, even for someone with little Blender experience as my self.

[Shadowhide]

shadowhide(ouch)

 

for all the pain that calls my name......

 

 

 

And this is coming from a guy who prefers CSG-subtract over clipper tool, and the only other person i've seen with that same philosophy is shadowhide(ouch)

 

I don't prefer CSG-subtract over clipper tool,I just said that I have nothing against CSG-subtract.If you use it,you must use it carefully to avoid superfluous brushes.It much faster than clipping,and become useful sometimes