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.
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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.
whatd you use in valhalla? extrude? attached seperate object? NURBS surfaces? creating faces?Quote:
Originally Posted by Conscars
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.
not too keen on making a tutorial lol?
Maybe I'll make a tutorial later.
The method of modeling doesn't have much to do with the program used. Only the tool names, layout and option names would be different. With an obvious exception being zbrush/mudbox. Not going to be doing multi million poly sculpting in max/maya very much.
yea.. ive found that even with a pretty darn good computer such as mine max even starts to super lag once i get over 200k pollys. zbrush tends to handle it much better though.
Why would you need over 200K polys?......
to look good lol, that's what normal maps are for
You can't apply a normal map to an entire level's cliff as they need to be tiled... The best method for cliff modeling is to create the basic shape of the map in a subdivided box, delete off the top cap of the box, and then subdividing and splitting polygons then moving around edges and vertecies to shape in details of the cliff.