How easy is it to create an outdoors environmentare there go

Post » Fri May 04, 2012 11:24 pm

Hi I've had some experience with indoors editing but never outdoors and I was wondering how difficult it would be to do some terrain editing but due to a busy schedule with school I've hardly had the time to teach myself and or look up tutorials so I was wondering if there are any particularly good ones out there specifically for the FNV edition of the GECK.
Thanks in advance!
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sally coker
 
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Post » Fri May 04, 2012 6:32 pm

My exact position about a month ago. As I've learned now, the GECK is a piece of brown poo when it comes to various tasks involved in creating landscape and terrain. The hardest tasks involved in making beautiful alluring outdoors with the GECK and in general would prolly be these things:
1)Creating a good heightmap
2)Painting and shading the texture from the textures palate
3)Making sure your colors, textures, etc. work well under the various weather conditions and light/day. If your ambient light is too high on a snow covered area, the sunlight during the day might blow out all ground detail.
4)Takes along time, very repetitive tasks. A lot of polishing.

It is seriously an art and a science. But more of an art. If you want tutorials on the theory of landscaping in video games, just watch any tutorial series and you might learn something general. Most books on game level design have a chapter on general landscaping theory including do's and dont's. I could hardly find anything on using the GECK landscaping utility. There's some very applicable info/tutorials on the TES wiki http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/Basic_Landscaping_Tutorial. I learned mostly from this website, the Construction Set is similar enough to GECK. Also looking at the vanilla landscape, and then manually recreating it myself. It sounds stupid, but it was helpful to just first try to emulate other more skilled ppl's work.

I suppose that at the end of the day, its harder then easier, but like any other thing in life, the more talent you have the more efficiently and enjoyably you can work.
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lolly13
 
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Post » Fri May 04, 2012 12:22 pm

Cool thanks!
Do you happen to know any height mapping tutorials/do's and dont's?
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mollypop
 
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