Low Poly Mountains - correct thread hopefully

newto3d

I've spent a few months looking at the awesome and inspiring work on polycount and now decided to join in on some of the crazy conversations

I'm fairly new to 3d (name gives that away) i was wondering if anyone can help me with the below.

I've seen a fair few low poly rock tutorial, which helps for cliffs etc. but i cant get these tuts to work for mountains. I'm wanting the bottom of the mid bit of the mountain playable, do you can fall off the edge.

my problem is i end up with a way to highpoly version or something thats way to low and looks crap. I'm not the best at texturing so guess that dont help.

Hope someone can help or point me in the right direction. Keep up the great work guys

Eric Chadwick

One idea... get a copy of Crysis and load up a level in their editor to take a look at how they do their mountains.

Often games use a heightmap on an evenly-subdivided model, like 2 quads per meter or so. After sculpting the heightmap, the env artist uses multitexture to blend between multiple tiled textures. See http://wiki.polycount.com/Multitexture

You can also crash a bunch of individual rock/cliff meshes into it, for more localized detail. See http://wiki.polycount.com/EnvironmentSculpting#Rock_and_Stone

I'm doing a lot of this right now, and it looks pretty good. Can't show anything from work though, sorry.

Also take a look at Red Dead Redemption for some ideas, great terrain in there. For example...

Autocon

I am also doing a ton of this at work right now, obviously cant show it either. But we utilize both methods of instanced assets mashed together and large more unique terrain pieces.

At Naughty Dog everything is modeled by hand, no sculpting and no height maps are used when doing terrain/rocks. Good old fashion polygon modeling.

Start with large simple shapes, Extream blocklyness to the max. Then start adding in more defining silhouette shapes. Dont get hung up on any one area and add a bunch of detail. Keep it lose and focus on shape and silhouette. Your textures are going to be key to the selling of low poly cliffs, that and the silhouette. Dont worry about modeling in detail because you will never see it.

Those RDR cliffs are very blobby models with almost all of the detail in the texture. The rocks are focused on shape and form since you see them from all over the map they have to read just the shape they make from miles away. The textures give all the details that would be to expensive to cut into the actual geo.


For closer rocks we make rock instances and pretty much jam them into eachother. This also works for far away rocks too. You will just want larger rocks with less detail or scaling up your rock instances.

Ben Apuna

There was some great discussion and links about this kind of thing in the Backgrounds and skyboxes in Bad Company 2 thread. Though IIRC the techniques discussed there were more for "background" terrain rather than "playable" terrain.

EDIT:

Thanks for the great workflow suggestions Autocon.

newto3d

thanks for the reply's, some great links there. The rdr pic looks pretty awesome, as im wanting to creating a mountain rather than a cliff im guessing its more of a texture thing and more of an angle to differentiate the 2?

i know im just asking rather than giving, sorry for that, will contribute when im better but does someone have a snowy mountain texture? that i could mold my model on maybe.

Thanks

CheeseOnToast

I doubt anyone's going to give you a texture just like that - it's not that kind of forum. However, have a go at making one yourself then you might get some help.

newto3d

@cheeseOnToast.... oh i have tried, blending a snow texture with dirt, but then adding that to the mountain it just looks crap and repeated. As i said im fairly new and learning a lot as im going. cool avatar btw

I will keep plodding along and try paste some embarrassing attempts

Eric Chadwick

newto3d wrote: »

oh i have tried, blending a snow texture with dirt

Multitexture is the way to do this. Won't work in just a single texture, instead you blend together two textures tiled across the terrain, painting the mask to blend them where you want them.

Great stuff Autocon!

newto3d

Hi guys, well see my crappy attempt. the model is 800 polys, i just cant seem to get a texture that looks good. in udk (vertex painting) ive tried blending 2 diffent textures, a browny rocky material for underneath then the snow for the top. I just cant get it to look right.

Any hints, what sort of size textures would u use, from a distance i can get it to look ok ish, but if u look at the pic with the scale (which is a tad too big) of my guy, when your that close to the mountain, the texture has to be awesome and its just not ....
[IMG]http://www.miatech.co.uk\sb\mnt.png[/IMG]

pointers please

Cheers

Eric Chadwick

Can't see any pics, but 800 polygons is really really low resolution.

To do snow well, you'll want a detail modulation kind of technique, like discussed here.
The Snow and Ice of Uncharted2?