Quick caverns recipe

[Sotha]

Here is pictures of the quick cavern preparation technique:

 

Phase one - make interlocking cylinders. They must fit seamlessly. You must plan the whole tunnel network with these. Adding parts and getting them align perfectly later on will be very difficult. You must have the whole thing in the rough cylinder sketch. Also keep visportalling in mind in your layout: you must have curves and space between the cylinders so that you can put caulk brushes to seal against the void. Pay attention to the junction. That is four cylinders, their other end vertices melded together so that the whole cylinder forms a triangly when viewed from above. You can cap dead ends with simply patch/cap. The caps can also be pulled in the vertice mode. You may need to manually set the new caps tessellation in the patch inspector.

 

Phase two - Make the cavey structure. Select all cylinders in the tunnel network. Fly through it in camera mode and drag vertices so that you get a organic tunnel feel. Remember to leave space for the caulk brushes you must put here. If the tunnel texture streches uglily in bent patches, use the surface inspector. Select "fit texture" 3x2 or 2x3 and press the fit button. Experiment with problematic patches until it looks good enough. 1x3 to 3x3 or 3x1 to 3x3 are usually good. You should hide ugly seams with other decorative pieces.

 

This is what it might look like:

 

Rather nice for something built this fast. Add details and, of course, add the caulk brushes into the space between the patches. Visportallize appropriately. Note that these must be monsterclipped very carefully if AI should navigate through these.

[Obsttorte]

Regarding organic looking caverns: The "bulge patch" option may prove useful here.

[grayman]

Does "bulge patch" only change the interior vertices?

[Obsttorte]

Bulge patch does change all vertices. But if the vertex count on the patches is high enough, readjusting the border vertices may get faster then changing the position of every single one. Another point is that it seems to me that it also smothens rough displacements brought into the patch, what may look more natural then having lots of edges.

 

I guess this is something every mapper has to try out and than choose the approach that seems more comfortable to them.

[Sotha]

You can always insert more vertices to the the cylinder. Then you can expand the middle ones to make a wide cavern. You can also operate in the z-dimension, making the cavern expand upwards or downwards.

[RPGista]

Nice tutorial! For those interested in trying their hands at modelling, there's a tutorial I used to make a cave model a while back, with a free (albeit problematic) program called Hexagon - this was the model http://forums.thedar...post__p__288456 , and this is the tutorial

Edited January 29, 2013 by RPGista

[simplen00b]

This looks great!

 

I did try something similar in DR, going for something very organic, twisty and messy. Unfortunately, my poorly organised thinking/planning meant I successfully achieved only the third objective.