Modeling Terrain

Anybody ever tried 3D Coat? It's a sculpting program, like ZBrush and Mudbox, except it uses Voxels instead of polygons. The advantage of that is that the sculpts are free of all topological constraints. You do not have to worry about edge flow AT ALL until you're finished. When you have something that is ready to be converted to polygons, there are really cool manual and AUTOMATIC retopology tools. Seriously, the thing is capable of doing all the work for you. Usuaually there are some symmetry errors in the result, but those are easily fixed in a 3D application.

So, if I were going to make terrain, I would go straight into 3D Coat and start sculpting. There's no real reason to do work in a polygon modeling application first. Then I'd autoretopo, export the polygon result, open it in my modeling application of choice, optimize the terrain mesh to a suitable degree. And done.

To be clear, I haven't actually tried this, nor have I messed with terrain in many years, but that's how I'd go about tackling it.

I've thought about doing the same thing, but I never took the time to get 3d coat.
You can do the same thing in 3ds max using meta blobs, but the topology is horrible which leaves you to re-top it.

Check out 3D Coats latest Autoretopology tool, which allows you to draw guides that help determine the edge flow of the resulting mesh. You'll notice that it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmU95Ciyw_M

This was the guy's first attempt. Some other videos I've seen have come out better, but they aren't on YouTube.

Hot damn

start with big subdivided plane (50x50?) then cut out your shape
clean up the edges a bit.
create height variations.
add plateaus along cliffs (very halo-style) by cutting them out of the ground, detatching, and moving them up.
then make the cliffs, bu draggin edges in increments, so ou get a decently fair distribusion of quads.
randomise your cliffs some more.
finalise your terrain.
add in some forerunner shit, and weld it all.
etc.

http://yfrog.com/18file17928z

A quick vid of metablobs I made.

I wouldn't use that for terrain or any kind of modeling, really. Looks more useful for animation.

Here are some examples of terrain work in 3D Brush, which is 3D Coat's predecessor. Four images on the first post and another about 2/3 down the page.

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=647