good cliffs

i was wondering how to make good-looking cliffs if you used a heightmap. A normap doesnt seem to work to well which i'm pretty sure is because my cliffs are too square and are basically a zig-zag pattern along the edge from a bird's eye view.

If I were you, I wouldn't use a height map.

If you insist, then to make them look better you just need to put in a little effort to move the vertices out of that grid pattern or better yet simplify the cliffs along their length so they're comprised of less vertical sections, then add detail.

Adding some noise (with fractal) can give fairly nice effects too.

I find that nurbs surfaces make nice cliffs. But there's usually a lot of cleanup after converting it to an editable poly/mesh etc.

thnx, i appreciated the input. I would redo the cliffs completely, buti have tunnels and stuff going through them already. The reason i used heightmap in the first place ws to get the basic shape of the cliffs (noticable from a bird's eye view) easily.

a combination of soft selection and noise, well, at least thats how i do it.

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Originally Posted by Conscars

If I were you, I wouldn't use a height map.

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whatd you use in valhalla? extrude? attached seperate object? NURBS surfaces? creating faces?

Maya is more akin to sculpting/box modeling/subdiv modeling, so that's how I made my cliffs. Initially, my terrain for the level was a 10 sided cylinder with the sides as the cliffs. I just kept cutting the faces and moving verts until I had the desired detail level. It's what I do with all my cliffs, whether the flat surface begins as a primitive or an edge extruded a few times along my cliff line.

o i have a free version of maya. i havent used it yet but i will now... of the maps ive seen, a lot dont have great cliffs; i think you should make a tutorial to show people to go beyond the limits of 3ds max.

You can do the same with 3ds max, I just find it harder to use.