Need advice for modeling or sculpting terrain using reference material.

yrogerg

Hi all!  I'm seeking some advice for my workflow... I have a project I am getting started on that involves modeling an island.  I have plenty of reference material for how I want this island to look, such as top-down drawings of the specific shape and size of the island as well as landscape features and several buildings, but I am not sure what the best technique would be for making my model as accurate to my designs as possible without just "eyeballing" it.  My goal is to get this model into Unreal 4 engine and part of my purpose in doing this is to help me teach myself how to use Unreal, but I have to make the models first before I get to that step... so I don't know if that affects the approach to tackling the modeling process at all, but that's what I intend to do with it once I've got the necessary assets created.

Just for the record, I have modeled numerous objects before and I have access to digital sculpting software as well, but I have never really tried modeling terrain before, which is the main reason I'm coming here for advice.  So with that in mind, what should I know before I get started?  Any advice or tutorials people know of that could be relevant would be greatly appreciated!  Also, as I mentioned before, I am curious what are some workflow strategies for sculpting terrain using "strict" reference material?

Scruples

Turn your top-down drawing into a heightmap and then import that into udk and edit it using the terrain editing tools, which would be the most straightforward way and still requires some "eyeballing". If you don't know how to do those things, then it's tutorial time

Steppenwolf

I had to do something similar for a job a while ago. I sculpted a basic terrain for a heightmap first then ran it through world machine for erosion and terrain layers which gives quite realistic and detailed looking results. But i don't think ther's a good solution to do this without any eyeballing unless you get to work with high quality real world terrain data to begin with.
I guess what you could try is turn your top down ref into a texture, apply to the sculpt plane before starting and use it as a guide. However should you use something like WM for detailing you will never have complete control over the end result because the erosion filters are procedural.

yrogerg

Scruples said:

Turn your top-down drawing into a heightmap and then import that into udk...

Steppenwolf said:

I had to do something similar for a job a while ago. I sculpted a basic terrain for a heightmap first...

Thanks for the tips guys! I am getting the sense that I should be trying to create a heightmap as the next step in my project.  If I am creating one manually using my drawings, is this process best done in photoshop?  Or is there specific software that is better?  I see, Steppenwolf, you said you sculpted  your heightmap, which sounds like it may also be a good place to begin.  I suppose I could get away with some eyeballing... but I just want to make sure I get all the relative proportions correct for the different sections of the island.  If you guys already know of any tutorials that cover this heightmap topic, it would probably speed up my work quite a bit!  I will definitely do a bit of searching on that subject today.

Also, I am using Maya and/or Mudbox for modeling... but I'm not as well versed with Mudbox, which looks like it would be far better for terrain sculpting than Maya.  How would I go about applying my image ref to a texture within the software?  I know there is a way to do this using an image plane in Maya so that it sits behind the model you are working on, but it's still not perfect for being able to see the details on the inside of the island since the model obscures the image plane unless I make everything  transparent.

Steppenwolf

Check out this old thread. Should have most of the info you need:
http://polycount.com/discussion/88933/how-to-make-terrains-for-games/p1

yrogerg

Oh excellent, that does look mighty relevant, thanks!

yrogerg

Upon closer inspection, I honestly am not sure how relevant some of those tutorials are anymore.  He did show how to export things from mudbox, which is always good to know.  There were also some very helpful tips for texturing terrain in UDK by the end of the series, though after 5 years the software has changed considerably... so I'll still have to figure out how to apply these tricks to the latest version of UDK.

Unfortunately he was not working with a reference for sculpting his terrain either, so it doesn't do much to help my main question.  Though it was fun watching him play around with Worldbuilder!  I might need to give that software a try for future projects where I can really play around with the look and shape of the terrain.  As for working from a reference, I was hoping there would be an easier method than simply eyeballing things, but oh well... time to get to work!