Snow mountains environment
polycounter lvl 14
Hello I wanted to ask you mastes if you know any tutorial on how to make a very good and nice realistic looking environment for snowy mountains , I have seen some online but they do not look so good... also what woudl you sugest to create a overterrain color map? some procedural constructs + photoshop in worldmachine , Vue , terragen , or what? how wold you approach the making of a nice level with surrounding snow mountains ? thanks a lot for any sugestion and answers 
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Replies
Im sure you can use the concepts from the tutorial and adapt it from the references for snow mountains you've gathered.
www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=66952
3Dmotive has a great sand/snow blending tutorial for Unreal that pretty much was born from that thread, if I remember correctly.
http://www.3dmotive.com/training/udk/advanced-mesh-paint-with-udk/?follow=true
http://www.planetside.co.uk/content/view/15/27/
or
http://www.world-machine.com/index.php
export maps and use them directly in a leveleditor or 3dsMax
lets say you have a 1 x 1 kms gameplay map and all around mountains to be seen from distance how woudl you texture those? use real geographical topomaps , use preprocessed maps , make procedural textures? manually paint them ?
Set it up right with a good macro, modified to suit. Shoreline (coastline?) is a decent one, replace grass with snow, sand with rock, and water with (whatever's at the base of your snowy mountains). Change the grass (snow) altitude and max angle, so it the more vertical bits are just sand (rock).
Export those, and you can import them into UDK or whatever, with the texture you want used.
unless I've misread your post and you're asking about the terrain shape itself. Make some mountains in Worldmachine, and find the option for Glacieal Erosion somewhere in erosion.
as an example and then this is what I woudl instead like to achieve ...
for closer
http://desktopwallpaper-s.com/wallpapers/63/Swiss_Alps.jpg
for more distant
http://7art-screensavers.com/screens/himalayas/himalaya-heavenly-union2.jpg
Or are you talking about actual 3D geometry that fills in the space between the skydome and the playable area?
For skydomes/boxes/panoramas, you can use any means necessary, there are a lot of these images floating around on the web. Depending on the style of the game and the complexity you might paint it by hand, or edit existing panorama's. You can take them yourself, there are a few camera phone apps to capture panoramas as well as just about any higher end camera will do it too. You can also create them in 3D and render out cubemaps from a point.
3D sky geometry is also by any means necessary, depending on the needs of the game and the resources available. It ranges so widely from game to game that there really isn't one workflow that fits everything. Even over the course of the game the skydome geometry might be down-res'ed so those polys could be better used in another place its all a balancing act.
Source has an interesting way of handling this, they create a separate area of the map that is 1/16 the scale of the rest of the map, everything that goes into this area is a 1/16th the size it normally would be, including the textures. This 3D skybox area is projected onto the sky of your actual level and appears to flow seamlessly into it. It saves on resources and reduces the overall size of the level. Because Source is still a closed leakless environment this is pretty critical.
Unreal skydomes are pretty much whatever you need them to be, typically its half of a sphere that sits around your level.
Crytek has a pretty elaborate system from what I can tell where the skybox plugs into a daylight system.
Just about every game out there has some variation on those three methods. So when you ask how do you make mountains, the answer is "it depends on the needs of the game and the resources available".
A good collection of resources on the subject of Environment skies is the wiki
wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentSkies
The latest version of UDK just upgraded the landscape tools in pretty significant ways.
http://www.leitgeb.it/upload/getfile/uploadfiles/Antholzer%20See.jpg
possible?
I'm not 100% sure how they handle those BG pieces. In BF 1942 up until Bad Company, I know they used a single top-down projected texture for the entire map, with detail textures tiled on top of that.
With Bad Company and Battlefield 3, they break up all of the terrain textures into tiles, so the terrain is comprised of dozens of 256x256 textures. The backgrounds could very well be a single unwrapped texture or top-down projection.
In Forza 4, I modeled and texture this background mountain piece:
It was done using a modified photo of a mountain, projected onto a plane. From there, I carved details into the plane and molded it into shape.
I thought the example you posted looked really good, surely its just a matter of tweaking until you get the exact look and style of mountain you wanted then use the erosion outputs as masks? Maybe worth looking at the world machine forum and tutorial section for tips and examples?