Basic Terrain Techniques

I use the Source Engine because it’s a relatively easy engine to use, and it’s used for many of today’s games. Besides, most level editors are too “complicated” for the company to release. In other words, they want to make money off of expansion packs.

Sure, one can argue maps can be good without advanced techniques, just make a couple rooms, two spawn points, and a light, and it will figure itself out. But I think what makes a good map great, is that extra bit of detail; it could be a bit of roughness in the wall, to a hollow crate with a part of it missing so you could see inside, or maybe just a giant hole in the wall.

So let’s talk about displacements, displacements is basically just a fancy word for editing the roughness of the terrain or environment. In this little scene I use displacements to make the level have a little bit more realistic feel to it.

 

Since it’s raised it doesn’t have as much of the “I’m trapped in a giant square box” feel. This is really handy when you are making an outdoor environment. Not that great for indoors though, unless it’s a ruined building that has a lot of buildup of earth. Although this looks good, we can always make it look nicer. By adding displacements to the sides of the walls, we can give it more of an outdoors feel. The Source SDK, or Source Development Kit, also gives the ability to “paint” the walls with grass and dirt so it looks much more like rock wall and less like a movie backdrop.

Now that the entire corner is rough it looks a lot more like a real outdoors environment. I also added a little bit of green to the rock to make it look better, and the ground displacement much less steep. Although it’s slightly difficult to correctly set up the horizontal displacement since to make the walls displace outwards out you have to change the axis, and it changes for each direction. Next up is a giant hole in the wall. No really, small things like holes or gashes in the level can be useful by adding more detail or making a way to get up something without using a ramp. You use the carve tool in the Hammer Editor to do this, and you could probably use the displacement to compliment it as well.

 Here we can see a basic hole in the wall. Beautiful, isn’t it? Things like these can add a level of detail to your map and will really pay off in the long run. Instead of jumping through a window, why not jump through a gaping hole in the wall? Why take the stairs when you can fall through the floor? These are just some of the many complex questions easily answered by today’s giant gaping holes used in level design.

Well, well, well. What do we have here? A box… Yes… A box… But not just any box, this one’s hollow, and It has part of it clipped away so you can see the inside part. Brilliant, isn’t it? Honestly I was just trying to show how the hollow tool and the clipping tool worked, well… Now you know.