Quake3World

Hi,

What sort of outdoor landscape maps have been designed to be some really nice detail?

The best approach for landscape is not by making it using brushes in GtkRadiant, but by using the heightmap terrain generation tools.

An alternate way of making terrain :

http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design/mp/pom.htm

It works well, but requires some practice, good textures and good shaders.

The heightmap generated terrain (terrain entity) is the old way to make a landscape map in quake3 and it does not work in versions earlier than 1.27g (the one Team Arena came with - you can notice Team Arena first has landscape maps in its install, baseq3 does not)

Y'all are acting weird, thinking if you make terrain from a heightmap then it can't be touched again. You can remove the flags from the entity, then turn it into a func_group or worldspawn, and use dp2 on it then. Making terrain manually is kinda absurd, though even if you do use heightmaps it might be necessary to tweak individual brushes on your own.

I use easygen'd terrain all the time, then just use alpha brushes instead.

Hmm, I can't think of as far as flat surfaces, a sky box to begin with.

As for a sphere?

richfromlondon wrote:Hmm, I can't think of as far as flat surfaces, a sky box to begin with.

As for a sphere?

You're talking about the sky ?

I remember in the SP mod "outpost" that the artist managed to mix a mountain horizon (done with a skybox) with the quake 3 generated sky.

If you want a spherical sky of some sort, you'll have to model it manually and then use a technique like skyportals maybe ?

I'm interested in making a sphere in a seperate sky box with a star/space texture to represent a planet in it. The scene would be used once the shuttle leaves the ship, a cutscene.

I imagine that is one way of doing that with the same map?

This is technically possible in the Q3 engine

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/idtec ... levels.php

Hmm, why Blender, I have used it in the past years ago for Ocean animation. But I wouldn't really know how to create much a landscape in it.

richfromlondon wrote:Hmm, why Blender, I have used it in the past years ago for Ocean animation. But I wouldn't really know how to create much a landscape in it.

You'll have to learn how to properly UV unwrap your terrain to make it look good, but I think there is good potential for nice visuals. The only problem are the collisions and player clip generation ...

I also use models for my terrain, you can look at the result here
http://lvlworld.com/review/id:2291

Not very big though.

richfromlondon wrote:Hmm, why Blender, I have used it in the past years ago for Ocean animation. But I wouldn't really know how to create much a landscape in it.

It really depends on what you're trying to achieve, the simplest terrain is just a subdivided flat plane that has a few hills pulled from it. But that can also be done using a brush tri-soup (which is what a terrain entity is when made using GtkRadiants own terrain generator), so you're not really gaining anything from using a model as your terrain.

You could do a combination of both, use trisoup for ground and then drop large models in to make it look interesting, that takes care of collision issues (which D-Meat alluded to) and add visual interest. Your biggest challenge is always going to be occlusion regardless, especially on open terrains; a brush-based terrain entity can deal with that better than a big-assed model.

The upshot of this is that you have to figure out what you want to do FIRST and THEN tailor your approach to that based on what you're comfortable doing.

Considering I haven't been successful with Icarus scripting, there aren't any tutorials for Elite force, I did try the Jedi Academy forums, they tried, but simple walking didn't work out. So as to how to load into another section or map, I don't know.

I could use a default Elite force terrain I found via a training map for the player. I could just use that, and place the spacecraft there with some NPC's standing around.

I don't know.

As for the example given, that was created using Blender? I have a copy of 2.63 on my pc, from last year. I think the current versions are still supporting Windows XP.

Eitherway it doesn't matter, 2.63 is fine. A basic sphere could be a planet model, since I can't really work with Icarus scripting for sending the shuttlepod anywhere, I could only delete the rotation of it once it leaves the bay, as it drops from an arm. Then arranging another camera around it was quite hassle to get something to change.

If anything I've wanted to try and create a character or something with blender. I may try soon with it.

I tried a sphere, scaled a little here and there, I did subdivide it a few times. None of that worked for importing into the Radiant program.

.obj format is supported for mapobjects. It's very basic stuff, export is very hard to fail. Have you UV unwrapped and textured your sphere correctly ?

Also, the name of your material is usually exported to the pathway to your shader (ex : name your material : textures/mymap/sphere)

Can't I just add in the object as a quake file without the need to do any extra tasks. I thought that would be fine, Hmm, I never thought to do any texturing there.

Not many programs can export to q3 map format - if you make anything externally, it will have to be converted to a compatible model format: .ase, .obj, .lwo (I know very little about this format).

It has to be UV mapped and textured and etc. outside of radiant; all you can do in radiant is scale, rotate, and replace the textures (and spawnflags and etc.).

In slightly older versions of Blender there is a q3 .map exporter.
As for models they need Materials, uv's

For Camaro model I followed up remaking from a web tutorial I used exporting to OBJ format and then I had to do some tweaks (for example size). Even to just load the model in Radiant it has to be textured directly for the mesh, not a link to material. For such tweaks I used MilkShape 3D to convert the model to MD3 format (both Blender and MS3D do not support ASE export and import). The main weak sign of MD3 format is that it has hardcoded path to the model, so if it is in slightly different folder or you did a misspell, it won't work. Also it is binary format, so any text edits will trash whole model. I am using MD3 format just because I do not have OBJ->ASE or BLEND->ASE convertor. If I had some ASE exporter for Blender, I could pretty easily export the original BLEND file to ASE. But I don't so I made the Camaro model this way... Maybe I will also download some MD3->ASE convertor or MS3D->ASE convertor or just ASE import/export plugin for MS3D to make tweaks like dividing model to multiple meshes from a single mesh or conjucting multiple meshes to single easily...

CZghost wrote:... I am using MD3 format just because I do not have OBJ->ASE or BLEND->ASE convertor. If I had some ASE exporter for Blender, I could pretty easily export the original BLEND file to ASE. But I don't so I made the Camaro model this way... Maybe I will also download some MD3->ASE convertor or MS3D->ASE convertor or just ASE import/export plugin for MS3D to make tweaks like dividing model to multiple meshes from a single mesh or conjucting multiple meshes to single easily...

Yes the path to the texture / shader has to be always precisely correct. ASE format is useful when you want to make something made in radiant into a map object, but it's rarerly used in the 3D world.

Richfromlondon : if you're dreaming of making more complex stuff, follow the simple modeling tutorials and learn about the UV texturing, it's really useful !

There are many blender to .ase scripts:
http://www.katsbits.com/smforum/index.php?topic=147.0 http://www.katsbits.com/tools/ just have to get appropriate blender version.

Also read: http://robotrenegade.com/articles/ase-l ... diant.html

Also 1024 poly smoothing issue http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewto ... w=previous