SC2Mapster

Weekly Terraining Exercise #195

Hello again people!

It's becoming hard to come up with themes; we've terrained volcano's, jungles, swamps, icy caves, dustbowls, temperate forests, voids and entire star systems! However, this week I wanted to approach the WTE through a bit of a different lens with the theme of "Globalization". Starting today I want you guys to terrain at least one entire continent of stuff. Obviously this means you will have to work on a very macro scale while staying zoomed out, as you will not have the time to terrain an actual continent with inch-level detail within every piece of land. We haven't done a lot of macro scale terrains yet and I'm curious what you guys will make of this.

As always: good luck, and have fun!

The Global Information/Idea thread for Terraining Exercises can be found here: http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/development/terrain/14658-terraining-exercises-global-information-idea-thread/

@Mozared: Go

I'll see what I can do with this one, I dont expect anything that would even FEEL as cool as what I worked on with the last WTE

This global enough for ya?

I have an idea but it's gonna take ages to install SC2 on this new computer.

@joecab: Go

You can always rely on Joecab for dramatic light displays and slightly titled camera angles :P. Looks pretty nice! Not as macro as I had in mind, but I'll allow it. I love all the little lights.

I spent an hour making this :

I must say that it's harder for me to make nice looking terrain at this scale.

@joecab: Go

Very nice job!

I liked a lot the background image on the last WTE. We could make background (skyboxes) for the next WTE maybe?

@Mozared: Go

It's called a dutch tilt!

@joecab: Go

How'd you make that sun? I've been looking for a way to make a decent sun and that shit's stupidly hard in this editor.

@SirDeeDs: Go

It is supposed to be a moon, and I just use a sphere model with the HDR upped a bit, and if you want glare you can put just off camera one of the lights with the lens flare.

I figured I'd try giving this one a go. It didn't turn out quite as macro as I was originally going for, but oh well. I also really wish that I had made this terrain facing the opposite direction, because most of the skyboxes I have found look significantly better from that angle, as does the water. Oh well. If anyone here knows an easy way to mirror everything on the map, then I would be more than willing to update this.

@Cacho56: Go

If only it were that simple. The issue with that is that the actor would be affected by the fog.

@Cacho56: Go

No, unfortunately that flag does nothing about fog. It says "fog," but actually means fog of war, which is something entirely different.

Solution!

I did a data scan for a while going combing through all the actor and model data to see if you could achieve rotating it somehow without making it an actor that is not effected by fog. Once I eliminated that I combed the editor for some reliable way to get rid of the effected by fog, and all I got was things on fog of war and not terrain fog. So feeling rather defeated I then went to the fog itself, this is when things got interesting.

So I created an actor for the skybox, effected by fog, yes

BUT! apparently if you go into terrain types and look at the fog options you will notice "Fog Distance Falloff", "Fog Distance Near", "Fog Distance Far". They should all be close to or at 0 by default so it will most likely be greyed out.

If you say put a value of 2 in Fog Distance falloff, A value of 500 in Fog Distance Far, and a value of 510 in Fog Distance Near, you will then have the terrain fog on your terrain but not in the massive sky box actor. You may need to play around with the values to make it work properly, I never know you could do this with the fog! :D

So it looks like what you are asking for is possible, not a 2 second step progress, but much less complicated than what I was initially attempting with actor events and all that crap.