[Tutorial]Good Cliffs Tutorial

[Andrew_b]

Well I made this tutorial to help newbies model better cliffs. This is also how I made the cliffs for Long Run. If you have some free time, feel free to watch and tell me if its good or not.

Link: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3904

Yeah, When I'm under pressure, my spelling and grammar is horrid.

Well, Enjoy!

PS. I didn't save the render of the finished product so I don't have a picture, My bad.

[SnaFuBAR]

The cliffs in long run suck though :raise:

[Andrew_b]

But, They are better then height maps. Am I right? I'm not the best modeler, but I thought this could help some people.

[l SINERGY l]

Heightmaps can be extremely useful when you use them properly. Check out a program called World Machine. It generates very detailed heightmaps than can even be exported as a mesh. From there you can refine it even more or use the high poly terrain to bake your normal maps onto a lowpoly version. The only downside is that you can't have stuff like overhangs in your heightmap.

Some things i'd like to point out about your workflow in that video...

3:35 - Switch to your front viewport select all of the edges and then alt select over everything but the top ones so only they're selected.

3:47 - Instead of extruding the edge a bunch of times why not select all the vertical edges and then hit connect.

7:03 - Same thing as 3:47.

9:30 - Stay in edge selection mode, and select one of the edges on your walkway path thing. Click on Ring and then Connect. BAM! way faster edge that's already selected for you and can be pulled down instead of going into vertex selection and pulling it down that way.

[Longshot]

They look okay, but I find it easier just to extrude the edges from the ground up instead of "wrapping" cliffs around a BSP, if that made any sense. You also have wasted a lot of polys. Then again who am I to criticize?

I prefer the cliffs from Blood Gulch; ripping the maps from SparkEdit can teach you a lot about the construction of the original maps.

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/2555/bg2uj1.png

[Bad Waffle]

you have to realize though, that map was modeled years ago when more detail was out of the question.

[Pyong Kawaguchi]

Indeed, hehehe, Atleast it looks better ingame than it does there!