Darksiders 2 - Tri Stone recreation

[Abyssinian02]

Hey guys,

I have a question. I'm working on making a recreation of Tri Stone from the game Darksiders 2. I'm quite far done with the models and after I want to put them in Terragen to make a setting from which I can take some renders.



For this however, I'll need quite exact control over how to make the terrain as I don't want the terrain to stick out of a model. It'll be a mountain, a ravine and on the other side a platform as well. Someone already made an example in Minecraft.


The look of the mountain area around looks like this:


My question is this; my knowledge of Terragen is extremely basic. Does anyone have any advice on how to best do this? I was thinking of making a heightmap, but I'm still not too great at that and Terragen seems to not always do what I want with that. Preferably I'd get a link to a tutorial or something for something similair or if someone could write something down. Again; my knowledge of Terragen is basic and minimal.

Thanks for any help in advance!!

[Dune]

If you're handy in making your terrain as a model, which you could make to fit exactly to your 'parts', you could import it and derive a heightmap from that, then displace the terrain from that heightmap (ortho render with luminosity and an altitude fuzzy zone), and add procedural detail to give it spunk.
Another idea would be to place a number of displacable cubes around and behind you parts, more or less fitting, and add displacement and texture to those. Plus is that you can place those cubes very precisely, and with one set of shaders attached to all, they kind of merge into eachother as one 'wall of stone'.

[Abyssinian02]

Hey Dune, thanks for the response.
You mentioned the idea of displaceable cubes before and it sounds like the way to go; is there a tutorial on that somewhere? Or like an example which I can reverse engineer?

[Dune]

I'll do a small example tomorrow.

[Dune]

Here's a file you can dissect. These spheres and cubes work differently than a whole globe/planet, so if you use strata for instance, it won't always work very well.
Sometimes when you change size or move a sphere/cube, the displacement suddenly becomes blocky. Just tick the lower choice (where it mentions displacement and normal stuff) and they will adapt again.
There's sometimes also an issue with PT and extreme displacements; areas get totally dark, so take care with those. RT works fine, and fast.

[Hannes]

Holy cow, Ulco, this looks so cool!!!!

[Dune]

And yet, it's so simple

[mhaze]

Very nicely done!

[Jo Kariboo]

WOW !!!! Thanks again Ulco for your generosity !

[WAS]

Here's a file you can dissect. These spheres and cubes work differently than a whole globe/planet, so if you use strata for instance, it won't always work very well.
Sometimes when you change size or move a sphere/cube, the displacement suddenly becomes blocky. Just tick the lower choice (where it mentions displacement and normal stuff) and they will adapt again.
There's sometimes also an issue with PT and extreme displacements; areas get totally dark, so take care with those. RT works fine, and fast.

So working on using this idea for someone's old project I never did (a cave of resurrection), and this method really, super duper, makes me want object grouping. This would make things sooo much easier.

[Dune]

I hope Abyssinian02 will be back a show what he made. He hasn't shown up after I posted that file, or quietly done so