open world game map

rbong obong

hey guys. i am a modeller in a small group who are making a medieval game.
the game will be set on an island that has been overrun by a new military an later on will be overrun by a demonic race. the games map will be a vast environment and as i am not an environment modeller i wanted some pointer from the polycount community.

here is the map design i am working from.



i also wanted t know what would be the best way to approach such a large task.
any help?

LlamaRider

This is a large task indeed but I can give you some tips.

You have the overall design of the map, that's good. Also the way you designed it (island) will make your work much easier. I recommend you starting with the World Machine to get the nice height map. The free version allows you to export max. 513x513px maps but you can export like 9 or 16 of them to get the high enough resolution and then merge some of them in Photoshop/Gimp/Krita.

But you should export 1 map at first and work on it just for testing purposes until you get comfortable with working on bigger environments .

Next thing is the overall breakup to make your map much more interesting. Just like they did in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Mark on your map key places such as cities and villages, biomes, story locations etc.



After you make it, go to the forest and take dozens of photos or/and search for references, I can recommend you this site:
http://www.reddit.com/r/sfwpornnetwork/wiki/network#wiki_nature
Pinterest is also good for that Search for trees, rocks, waterfalls, mountains whatever you want to put in your game. You need a lot of that... A LOOOOOOOOT!



When you have it done time to plan all this thing out on https://trello.com/



This is one of the most useful apps for task management. Guys working on Rust are also using it so... yeah use it.
https://trello.com/b/1iXNdiYw/rust-art

Ok... at this stage you should be conscious of the task you're working on. The rest of it is just production. Lots of foliage, trees, rocks, caves, villages, cities, story locations, terrain textures, skyboxes, water, shaders etc. etc. etc. There are lots tutorials for that.

Good luck

Eric Chadwick

Excellent post!

We also have some resources here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Landscape

rbong obong

thanks guys for the replies.

after i was happy with the map design i remade it in blender.


next i generated a height map from this image and took it into world maker.


the results in world maker were good but not quite what im wanting so i will get it back into blender and modify it.

after this i will try and split up the world into different areas but thats easier said than done. im still unsure what to do next? just populate the area with houses and other stuff? or do i add other stuff like grass. and also the scene really is slowing down my computer so how do i go in and sculpt landforms and caves.

help would be greatly appreciated and thanks.

fullchaos13

I see you're doing the base meshing inside of blender, always cool seeing another person use blender. Anyways blender has an add on that handles terrain generation and I thought you might find some use out of it. Here's a short tutorial on it: https://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/03/01/tip-using-the-ant-landscape-add-on/

rbong obong

yeah i know its been ages since my last update and i decided to focus on one of the smaller side islands. so i took it into world machine again and then exported it out to blender, here is what ive got so far.


you might spot a small sqaure, that is a house i put in to visualize the scale.
the island will be 1km by 1km and will contain a small village, a military camp, a cave, a forest and houses dotted about.

crits welcome

Eric Chadwick

Which game engine do you plan to use? You should get your terrain working in there, before moving any further. You need to establish the scale, the game flow, etc.

Your new island is missing a lot of the interesting topology from the original map... coves, bays, smaller islands and rocks, etc. Those add a lot of visual interest, especially at the scale of the players POV.

rbong obong

we will be using the unity engine for the game, also this island is a much smaller island and less detailed because it is the small island of the coast of the bigger island.
this will be a starting area and you will slowly move your way up the island.

MisterSande

Some things to consider when generating and texturing the big island:

- you can use colormaps from WorldMachine (use the coastel overlay) as a basis,
then import them into Photoshop to get more details. You can also do this in Worldmachine itself but it is pretty advanced to get decent results.
- an alternative is to simply use a fairly basic color texture from worldmachine and use your Unity's texture painting tools to manually texture your terrain.

It is most useful to sculpt a very basic, but more importantly, flat worldmachine map and later add additional mountain/hill props seperately. This allows you to have more creative freedom when designing your game. Allot of the times you will need to go back and forward and change the terrain itself to fit certain gameplay requirements.