how to model/texture a large-scale environment

WindchILL

Sorry for the noob question, but I've been wondering how do you make sprawling natural environments (game worlds) that you see in most video games? If I'm not mistaken it has something to do with megatextures and modular meshes. Does anyone know of any good resources/tutorials teaching how to do this in Maya? I've always been puzzled as to how to make a huge environment...

Obscura

Do you mean terrain?Most engines have its own terrain tool, and they can use heightmap, or you can sculpt the terrain in the editor.

joeriv

http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentTerrain

http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentModeling?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironment%5Cb%29

if looking towards large terrain/outdoor things, have a look at "Choco's" tutorials, and have a look at "welcome to celeryland".
and once you have that have a look at more specific things such as making rocks/vegetation/props/and so on to fill everything up.

some paid tutorials for some specific things:
https://www.3dmotive.com/f102101 (foliage)
https://www.3dmotive.com/f101001
http://eat3d.com/udk_modular

WindchILL

thanks for the starting resources, i'll look into those. however, the visual style i want to go for is similar to games like WoW or Torchlight, where the entire terrain is hand-painted. do the same technique still apply?

and giving choco's tutorial a quick glimpse, he mentioned that the first basic step is to "export a plane in maya (512*512 units)". just to clarify, do units correspond to the squares on maya's default grid or are they user-defined?

Obscura

if you work on hand painted stuff, then you dont really need to sculpt your terrain in sculpting software.just paint your textures, then make the terrain in the target engine's editor with the terrain tool.