Anyone have any great tips on how to make gradually sloping terrain that's symmetrical like have two different heights and then a perfect slope between the two.
Tips for gradual sloping terrain
- Thread starter Phenix Studios
- Start date
It's not hard, it just takes a lot of patience.
You have 2 main controls in the terrain tools: intensity and radius. To make long, smooth slopes, set the intensity down to about 15% and the radius down to somewhere in the 4-8m range, whatever works best for your application. Then just do a LOT of manual polishing, up and down, back and forth, using whichever terrain tool (push, pull, smooth, or slope) you think is most advantageous at the moment. It is ENTIRELY the same as sculpting with wet clay, or potting before the invention of the potter's wheel. Infinite patience and a few beers will get you through.
create a builder tool:
1. start a building, set a first gridded building piece. you just need that to keep your builder tool together.
2. next, inside your building create a flat scenery surface by using some of these huge rectangle art shapes. add as much as you need to gain a good sized tool for your needs.
3. still inside building edit mode, select your surface (only the ungridded art shapes) and then adjust the angle you want to have for your terrain.
if your tool is ready, you can move it to the desired terrain section - place your tool below the terrain section / mountain / whatever and then dig down with low intensity (see Bulletheads description) until you reach the surface of your tool - which serves nice as perfect marker for your terraforming job. if you're done, go on to the next section.
anytime you need a different angle you can simply return to your builder tool, switch to edit mode and repeat step 3.
1. start a building, set a first gridded building piece. you just need that to keep your builder tool together.
2. next, inside your building create a flat scenery surface by using some of these huge rectangle art shapes. add as much as you need to gain a good sized tool for your needs.
3. still inside building edit mode, select your surface (only the ungridded art shapes) and then adjust the angle you want to have for your terrain.
if your tool is ready, you can move it to the desired terrain section - place your tool below the terrain section / mountain / whatever and then dig down with low intensity (see Bulletheads description) until you reach the surface of your tool - which serves nice as perfect marker for your terraforming job. if you're done, go on to the next section.
anytime you need a different angle you can simply return to your builder tool, switch to edit mode and repeat step 3.
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Use flat surface scenery -> shapes as example...
1. create a piece of scenery that is flat and make sure it can be rotated in all dirrection (without gridded pieces)
2. Place/ rotate it just above the spot you want your slope .
3. Make sure that no terrain collision is off (blanco box in the options)
4. Make sure that on your terrain tools the box "scenary lock" is checked.
5. slowly level your terrain in place (15 - 25%)
When you did everything correctly the terrain shoudn't be able to pass through the scenary you placed (with a small gap between terrain and the object)
6. delete scenary and you have a nice slope...
If you prefer a video how to do this let me know then i make one
1. create a piece of scenery that is flat and make sure it can be rotated in all dirrection (without gridded pieces)
2. Place/ rotate it just above the spot you want your slope .
3. Make sure that no terrain collision is off (blanco box in the options)
4. Make sure that on your terrain tools the box "scenary lock" is checked.
5. slowly level your terrain in place (15 - 25%)
When you did everything correctly the terrain shoudn't be able to pass through the scenary you placed (with a small gap between terrain and the object)
6. delete scenary and you have a nice slope...
If you prefer a video how to do this let me know then i make one
That's a good trick, but it has its limits.
The thing about using scenery as a slope template is that the wider across you make the slope, the more artificial it looks due to the long, straight lines of constant slope. Thus, unless you're modeling something that's man-made, such as a terraced garden, a talus at the foot of a castle wall, or a Maya pyramid, large-scale work is best done by hand, carefully sanding the dirt down with many passes on low intensity, so you get a naturally rounded shape. But OTOH, the template method is IDEAL for getting a path up the side of an otherwise jagged mountain.
I agree it doesn't look natural but perhaps a number 7. woud help for that,... smooth the terrain after deleting the scenery and edit further until it's perfect
You can ofcourse place scenery (shapes) in a slight rounded curve too, but that might prove to be more time sloping then creating it by hand...(haven't tried it yet)
Anyway just pointing out some way to do it... it's worth exploring and usefull for manny things, certainly to place nice sloped paths... like you said.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I think I'll probably do it by hand the way i did it the first time. Problem is getting the paths just perfect to go around my slope