Making realistic outdoor environments

[Nevander]

Any advice for making realistic looking natural rock pillars/columns or stalagnats? I think that's what they are called. Making realistic outdoor areas in Doom's engine is a challenge. Always struggle with it!

Here's what I've got right now. It's do-able, but I just don't like it much:
(click it to enlarge)

[dshel]

Any advice for making realistic looking natural rock pillars/columns or stalagnats? I think that's what they are called. Making realistic outdoor areas in Doom's engine is a challenge. Always struggle with it!

Here's what I've got right now. It's do-able, but I just don't like it much:
(click it to enlarge)

From my (very limited, absolutely shitty) experience in making organic environments:

>slopes...every where slopes
nature is nothing but a million billion slopes everywhere. Vertex slope things, align plane line slopes...you name it, nature has sloped it.
Notice that anytime NASA brings back a photo of some feature of mars where even an approximate 90 degree angle exists, the tinfoil crowd buck up and start screaming about "lol aliums" -- this is because on earth, nature tends to make maps with slopes, while man is known to use 90 degree angles and techbase for everything.

>spam some sort of generic grass actor all over everything
from oblivion to STALKER, this is the trend for masking the fact that "dirt" textures tile and look like shit when viewed in a large open expanse. If appropriate to the environment, cover it in grass, heather, shrubbry or whatever...

note that this kills the rendering speed of the map if you do it wrong.


>chaos
change floor heights randomly...not significantly, but often. For example: making a winding, organic shaped cave-corridor? connect all adjacent verticies, make sectors out of each, change their relative heights by 8-16 apiece and add line slopes to the lot o'em. Also, avoid 90 and 45 degree angles in all matters. avoid perfect polygons too.


>line horizons
these are useful too. make sure you give some "legit" reason for the invisible wall they generate to exist, though.


As for rock pillars specifically, yours look pretty good. the thing throwing my eye off in your pic is that your walls are all sheer 90 degree vertical things.

[Athel]

It looks lile youre aiming or Boom compatibility. (?)

Your shot looks good, my advice is this.

If the natural environment your making is a forest, then you'll want to make the landscape dirt, trees and a bit of water streams. If its a mountain, varying degrees of height and brightness levels do the trick. The bottom of the mountain should be green, fuether up dirt and the top possible snow. If the environment is a cliff (Grand Canyon), then itd be mostly smooth with a gigantic dropoff leading into water. A cave or even a rocky area should have different height values, grass\dirt used abundantly, height and some water would work.

The stalagtice pillar you got there looks great and I really want to beta test that map of yours soon

[Guardsoul]

It really depends of the type of map you´re doing. I´ll leave you this as reference (more to come soon): http://imgur.com/a/GNChI

[Raziel236]

stalagmites and stalactites. (floor and ceiling respectively)

[Enjay]

Because they need to be mighty to push themselves up from the ground but need to hang on tight if they are on the ceiling.

[Nevander]

As for rock pillars specifically, yours look pretty good. the thing throwing my eye off in your pic is that your walls are all sheer 90 degree vertical things.

Thanks, and yes, I am going to come back and smooth them out. They originally were smooth, but I am rebuilding the vertices, as well as the map itself pretty much. It needed a remake.

It looks lile youre aiming or Boom compatibility. (?)

Your shot looks good, my advice is this.

If the natural environment your making is a forest, then you'll want to make the landscape dirt, trees and a bit of water streams. If its a mountain, varying degrees of height and brightness levels do the trick. The bottom of the mountain should be green, fuether up dirt and the top possible snow. If the environment is a cliff (Grand Canyon), then itd be mostly smooth with a gigantic dropoff leading into water. A cave or even a rocky area should have different height values, grass\dirt used abundantly, height and some water would work.

The stalagtice pillar you got there looks great and I really want to beta test that map of yours soon

It really depends of the type of map you're doing.

The environment is a ravine/huge cave. I am planning to have lots of shadows and a good sector brightness transition effect, right now I only have the basics. I was busy working on the stalag-things and noticed how odd they looked. That's why I was curious about outdoor areas, and how strange they look in Doom. I was playing Speed of Doom yesterday, and noticed MAP01 has a similar thing that I'm trying to achieve. His is on a much smaller scale, but it's the same idea. Looking at his, it looks a lot like mine. It's just that his is smaller and inside a smaller cave.

[Kappes Buur]

With the extended/advanced features found in GZDoom Builder, Grubber's ZTerrain is viable again.

See also http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=45910

While creating the heightmaps (Iusually I do this with Jasc PSP8) and subsequently the terrain seem to
be daunting tasks, with a bit of practice they become easier with each iteration.

Footnote:
Too bad that bagheadspidey could not finish his Terrain Generator.
It looked so promising.

If one were satisfied with environments such as simpler caves or open areas with canyons, then one could
run OBLIGE 6.10 and have it generate them.

[Guardsoul]

The environment is a ravine/huge cave.

Did someone say "caves"?

---

Slope spam all over the map basically

[esselfortium]

One thing that's often overlooked when designing outdoors scenes in Doom is to vary the height of your surrounding structures. You can do this with rock walls and building walls both. In any real outdoor area, there are going to be structures of different heights, rather than all fixed-height walls under a flat sky. Combining solid (1-sided line) walls with raised floors (2-sided lines) makes this possible in Doom. It takes some getting used to, but it makes a massive difference in the aesthetics of an outdoor scene. Even just having a building facade that's a bit taller than the surrounding rocks will make a difference in beilevability, and the effect will be further improved by going further and adding rock faces that open up to reveal more sky. The Crucified Dreams map "Tarantism" has some really ambitious use of varied sky heights in an outdoor area, all cleverly designed to avoid any sky cutoffs on the height changes. In ZDoom you can also make use of 3D floors and portals to further avoid sky cutoffs when doing complex outdoor scenes.

Lighting and texture variation are also important to grasp for outdoor scenes, though they're important for any scenery in Doom. Find some maps that you like the aesthetics of, and study how they've handled lighting and texturing their scenes. Both are crucial for creating contrast, so that your shapes appear well-defined and your scene doesn't just turn into a blob of solid brown mush. In your scene, it looks like most of the area is covered with TANROCK5 at a constant light level, with a brown ASHWALL used for a thin ceiling border and the central pillar. The overhanging ceiling trim is odd here, as it doesn't appear that the area is supposed to be a cave with a hole in its ceiling. I'd either reshape the ceiling trim into a skyhole in a thick cave ceiling, or remove the trim entirely and instead reshape the walls to vary their height and show more sky in places. If you want, you could potentially keep some overhanging rocks in part of the scene, hanging from the tallest section of rock wall, but I'd use several layers of different heights so that you can create a smoother shape as well as casting a gradated shadow underneath it.

It's also worthwhile to think about the thicknesses and shapes of structures. The rock pillar in your screenshot looks unrealistic because its heavy top doesn't have anything supporting it. The middle is all carved out, so it's not being supported by the lower half, and it's not attached to a thick surrounding ceiling of an indoor area that it could believably be hanging down from. The ceiling trim appears similarly flimsy, and this is further accentuated by its texturing difference that contrasts it from the surrounding walls.

I'd also generally avoid the use of perfect stairstepped shapes for rock structures in Doom, as they often look unrealistically blocky. It's easier to create a convincing natural appearance with more asymmetrical shapes made up of intersecting curves.

There are a bunch of detailed rock pillars and caves in Air Jordan, my map for 32in24-14. As of this writing, the full wad isn't released yet, but the map is here, and textures for it are here. Looking at those would probably explain a lot of these techniques better than I can do here! For a simpler (vanilla-friendly) but effective rock/landscape technique, check out Speedtraps For The Bee Kingdom from Back to Saturn X episode 2. For more advanced techniques and slope-heavy ZDoom rocks, two great examples are Vader's map Blackrock from ZPack and Espi's map The Shrine from the Eternal Doom IV demo.