Hello all. As requested (and as thanks to Green Gandalf for his help over the years with shaders, textures, and all sorts of stuff), I've decided to make a tutorial on how to create a unique terrain in Blender. By unique I mean a "non-heightmap" look, which we are accustomed to seeing in DBP.
I have decided to do it in the latest alpha version of Blender, because version 2.49 gave me some serious glitches when making terrains.
I'm going to start with the actual sculpting of the terrain, and then I'll do a section on creating a base texture later. GG is currently helping me (OK, he's doing all the work
) to get detail maps working on a finished exported object. That will be the final step, once it is functioning correctly.
Here we go:
First, press 7 on the number pad to go to the top view, and delete the default cube. Then, press the spacebar and type "add plane" into the textbox that pops up. Press enter to create the plane. Then, press tab to switch into edit mode, and find the button named "subdivide" on the left panel. The number of times you click it will depend on how much detail you want. I found 5-6 times is plently. I chose 6.
Now scroll down the left panel and click the "smooth" button under the "Shading" header. Then click the mode combo box and change it to sculpt mode.
Scroll up the left panel until you can see the "size" and "strength" bars as well as the list of brushes. Hold the middle-mouse button down and drag the mouse to move to a suitable angle, then click and drag on the plain to draw. If it is too drawing too slowly, drag the "strength" bar to the right. 0.5 is a good value.
Be sure to save your work every once in a while. If you want to export your map to test it in DBP, go to File>Export>3D Studio (.3ds). Blender 2.5 does not currently have a DirectX (.x) exporter, so we will have to convert the .3ds file. I uploaded the DarkBasic converter to this post. Simply put the .3ds file in the folder and run the exe.
That's part one of the tutorial. It's nothing complicated, but few are aware of the capabilities of Blender.
