As most mappers know, making terrain out of brushes in radiant is near impossible and making terrain out of patches kills your nexuiz framerate. Blender 3d and the blender quake 3 (.map) exporter to the rescue. Here's what i was able to achieve with little effort (note the framerate).


The blender quake 3 (.map) exporter works well with all sorts of meshes but terrain is the thing I strongly recommend it for.

What I did (blender)
1. Create a plane. Subdivide it few times.
2. With proportional editing on i move around a few points to make mountains. Sculpt mode is good for this also.
3. Convert quads to triangles.
4. Add and apply decimate modifier to decimate to an appropriate tricount (sweet!)
5. Select plane and Export .map

What I did (GTKradiant 1.5)
1. load map
2. box terrain in
3. create spawnpoint.
4. Used the replace texture feature to replace the blank texture/shader with sand.
5. Set all terrain to detail brushes or you get "MAX_MAP_VISIBILITY exceeded" in vis build process.
6. Build! (Took pretty long though.)

I think the final result and workflow was MUCH better than using gensurf or terragen. I STRONGLY recommend this approach over the use of patches.
What i can't decide is if this is better than importing a model. I'm leaning this way though.

Why not simply use a model?

On the model side you control the uv unwrapping. On the brushes side of things, well, they'r e BRUSHES. Boolean off excess, different textures in different parts etc. The more I think about it the more i realize that this is WAY better than using a model.

Nice one Ihsan this is exactly what I've been looking for. What do you mean by boolean off excess ,this is in blender or radiant?

that's something I made quickly in blender using bump mapping based on a texture I made in gimp really quick. I'm trying to export that as a .map file but I can't seem to get that working. If someone could point me in the right direction that'd be great.

@phyber this looks way too complicated if I'm not wrong the .map exporter turns very face into a brush so that's going to be one hell of a lot. Anybody know what the practical upper limit for the amount of brushes is?
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@Ihsan , are you using the .map exporter that is pre-installed in Blender?
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It works!i!i!i!i!
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Height mapping for maccers, and evrybody else too!
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D ... heightmaps

[TSA] Psychcf wrote:

that's something I made quickly in blender using bump mapping based on a texture I made in gimp really quick. I'm trying to export that as a .map file but I can't seem to get that working. If someone could point me in the right direction that'd be great.

what does the blender console say when you try to export?
This looks seriously subdivided. Maybe it's just taking a long time to write all those brushes.

NOTE: the .map exporter only exports SELECTED meshes.

Rad Ished wrote:@phyber this looks way too complicated if I'm not wrong the .map exporter turns very face into a brush so that's going to be one hell of a lot. Anybody know what the practical upper limit for the amount of brushes is?

That would explain it. So maybe I should export it as an ASE/obj, or wound that make no difference? When I try to export it blender locks up and it only makes an empty .map file...

my guess is that it would be way to complex for a map anyway... maybe I should make it a lower resolution...

[TSA] Psychcf wrote:my guess is that it would be way to complex for a map anyway... maybe I should make it a lower resolution...

Definitely. You can make bumpmaps to simulate all that extra geometry.

If you were to make all terrain brushes detail, you may as well not compile the -vis phase.

I prefer to use a combination of FATE, EasyGen, Nemesis' Terrain Generator, and GTKgensurf when I find it; but then again, these are all Windows/Linux only.

TVR wrote:If you were to make all terrain brushes detail, you may as well not compile the -vis phase.

I prefer to use a combination of FATE, EasyGen, Nemesis' Terrain Generator, and GTKgensurf when I find it; but then again, these are all Windows/Linux only.

AFAIK, none of these can fold beyond 90 degrees as i have done in the demo. None on these can, for example make a cave.

Technically, that wouldn't be terrain, it would be an interior... Blender isn't completely the method to use, EasyGen is to be used for texturing with more than one texture.

Or, you could just use an .ase model, and it would be much smoother, and you wouldn't hit the max_map_vis. Just look at what can be done with Brokenworld or Silvion. You also have much more flexibility with the UV map.

Speaking from a Q3 engine perspective, you'd want to use easygen to generate a metashader for texture-blending.

Speaking from the Darkplaces' perspective, you'd use easygen to smooth the height map, then import it into GTKgensurf for decimation, and auto-hinting.

From any perspective, phong shading + vis calculation is still a must for terrain.