Forum: Vue


Subject: Texturing complex terrain

GunnerMan opened this issue on Dec 28, 2007 · 16 posts


GunnerMan posted Fri, 28 December 2007 at 2:23 PM

Hello, 
I am very new to Vue about a week and I have been playing around in it and reading/following all the tutes I could. I have made some scenes I thought were pleasing considering my inexperience. I have been working mainly with the Ecosystem editor and predone trees and terrain textures that i fiddled with a little bit. I still don't know how to make a realistic terrain as i am used to real time 3d terrain modeling wich makes life a thousand times easyer. With time I will get there though.

So far my biggest problem was getting the textures of the ground to look realistic, from what I know you can only combine 2 materials to put on a single terrain and these materials are very limited on where they go in the terrain. I can set them for altitude, slope, and direction. Pretty good for a general "base" texture but what if I want a specific area to be a deadish swampy looking area and the rest around it to be grasslands and have a mountain in the distance with a lightly wooded but dry earth terrain. That would require at least 3 material sets on one terrain, placed in specific spots. Is there any way this can be done? It seems like in the screenshots I see they achieve this but maybe it is by other means.

Also bodies of water. It seems there is no easy way to make a nice river or a lake. I figured out I could create a plane and resize it to fit just where I want it and then add a water texture to it and walla. Works ok but can be tedious moving the plane and then opening the terrain editor and guessing where my river is and fixing the terrain to work with it. Then if there is a bend in the river you need to make a new plane so the water bodies don't match. I have not explored how to change a wave direction or amplitude yet because from what I know now it is just to hard for me to make a realistic river bed.  I have searched for tutorials on making rivers etc but it seems it is not an issue for anyone.  

I will attach an image to show you what exactly I want in the terrain. I was looking for a gold look on the ground to simulate falling leaves but still have some muddy and grimy places because the trees still looked very full and had not droped enough leaves to completely cover the ground.