Landscape Tool - Simple editing with caves for a 3D modelling noob?

Hi,

I'm looking for a package that will allow me to 'paint' the landscape topology (like in the Unity terrain editor), and tunnel out areas to create interconnecting caves on a solid closed model. I don't need it to create materials etc, just the solid 3D Mesh object. I'm saying a solid object as I am thinking collision detection would be better.

Some control over the poly size for optimizing would be good also...

I've looked at all sorts. inc, Sculptris, Bryce, etc. But I can't seem to be able to 'model' the caves in any of them.

Any suggestions?

 

I'm not sure what you mean by 'model' the caves. The closest I think you could come to something like this would be to 'sculpt' the mesh but I would think that this would be way more difficult than creating your basic box tunnel layout and then adding some kind of a subsurface modifier to it. I suppose it would depend on the complexity of the mesh you want to create.

I would say the most efficient way to accomplish a cave and tunnels thing would be to first create a polygon path of the tunnel. Once you are happy with the layout, extrude the entire thing once to make it more of a cardboard box looking tunnel. Then make two edge loops through the entire thing. One on the side and one on the top. That way your box now has four faces for each side. As long as its a clean edge loop you should be able to select the whole thing depending on the 3D package you are using. Scale the edge loops you made in the direction away from the original box and you get a cylinder tunnel looking mesh. You can subdivide from here to increase the complexity. And then use some sculpting tools to push and pull polys until it looks the way you want it to.

You could also begin with a cylinder to start with and extrude things from the top view. But I sometimes find that I get a lot of pinching and strange looking angles when I do this.

 

Hi Bridin,

To clarify, I am looking to make the caves more natural, rather than boxy.

The sculpt method you mention seems to be the way I am going, and I found a few more applications to do this, but can't investigate them until I get home from work. The terrain sculpting style in Unity is pretty much the way I would like to do it. Paint3D, Mari, Mudbox, are all ones I will be investigating. I don't mind paying money, but many of them seem like overkill for my simple needs...

Thanks for the input!

 

UFOHunter: Is this the kind of thing you are looking for (a shot from Unity 4 game window - see image below)?

cheers, gryff

 

Hi Gryff,

Yes, that kind of shape for the caves. To clarify further, I need to paint hills on the surface, but 'burrow' caves so I can go down a hole then pop out in another part of the landscape. I don't need to be able to do this at runtime either which is why I have posted here in the External Tools section.

I just want to be able to easily landscape a play area mesh probably no more than 1000 Unity units. The mesh bit is actually important as I want to be able to export the mesh and then import into Unity.

 

Well, unity terrain doesn't support tunneling or caves. You need to use a mesh. Laying it out with boxes/extrusions IS the way to go, then you subdivide that and sculpt the details. You do this by inverting the normals, so your sculpting it on the inside. Any of those sculpting programs you mentioned, including sculptris can do this. If you want it to pop out on the surface, your likely looking at some kind of boolean operation and then connecting it with another mesh on the surface, otherwise you can have it appear on the surface in unity terrain, and when you enter it, seamlessly teleport the player into the cave system

 

UFO: Using the Unity terrain system does have some benefits - splat mapping and painting on trees. However, as larvantholos points out above tunneling is not supported by the Unity terrain system so you seem to have three options.

1. Use a Unity shader (there seem to be two) for faking a hole in a Unity terrain. Look up "Terrain Hole" at the asset store. The holes seem to be rectangular in nature but you can probably use a seperate mesh object made for the tunnels to help cover up that . The shaders I gather disable the mesh collider where you have created the hole. I have never tried this - but you may get more help/details on the Shader Lab forum

2. Model your the terrain and caves as a mesh. How you would texture this might be quite a task and tree creation would have to be done differently. The image below is a terrain mesh that effectively cut a hole in and connected to a seperate piece of my tunnel system. I did it somewhat differently than larvantholos suggested (I did not use booleans).

3. A mixture of Unity terrain and mesh. You could create a Unity terrain then slice the terrain into smaller pieces (see the "Terrain Slicing and Neighbouring Kit" at the asset store. Export the piece of terrain where the hole will be - cut the hole (and create tunnels if you don't do that as a seperate mesh) then import that mesh with the hole. Replace the piece of terrain it was create from with this mesh. Now you can at least add trees and use a splat map for the remaining terrains (and the terrain slicing kit appears to allow some recombination). Again never tried this kit and how you texture to avoid seams maybe a task.

Those are my thoughts for now.

cheers, gryff

 

Hi Gryff,

Great feedback as always

I am going to make my needs even clearer as everyone seems to be (understandably) making the same assumptions:

1 - I have no need for trees or other objects on the terrain / cave system
2 - Don't worry about how I am going to apply texture etc - I have that covered
3 - Don't think that what I am doing is to create a generic simulation of real world landscape as seen in standard FPS shooters, etc. It is far more abstract than that!
4 - Simplicity is the key to the landscape I am creating - Low-Poly - Simple Hill/Mountains - Holes in the ground which actually lead to other points in the landscape.

I totally agree with the second point you made (make the landscape as a mesh) is the way I need to go. After many more days exploring I am pretty sure that what I am looking for is some kind of volumetric sculpting tool that allows for the creation of interconnecting holes.

Sculptris which be perfect but once again creating an actual system of interconnected holes seems to be beyond it's scope.

Am I asking for the impossible here? Interconnecting holes seems to be such a 'logical' requirement when sculpting any object, yet alone landscapes.

I really appreciate the responses here guys.

 

Well, if you mean using a sculpting program to do it all - probably yes.

Over the years I have used a number of 3D modelling programmes - sometimes just to try them out, sometimes for achieving a particular goal. Only one programme that I have used comes close to having a tool capable of "sculpting" out tunnels. That was Truespace (version 3.2 maybe).

Truespace was bought by Microsoft a few years back - and then Microsoft essentially abandoned it. Legal copies of Truespace v7 are available on the internet - and there are still users.

The tool I refer to is essentially a dynamic boolean tool. You have a solid object that you want to create tunnels in then drag a low poly sphere through it creating the tunnels. How it would work with standard terrain type object (essentially a plane) I have no idea.

As I remember, and it was 10 years ago, it created quite a high poly count. The other drawback, to me at least, was the Truespace interface - which I did not like.

So if you are happy with a mesh object, it certainly can be done standard modelling tools (I use blender) . I did another creation in blender (see image below). I used the blender sculpting tools to create the hills (no attempt at any elegance) then used a technique I picked up from a tutorial to cut the hole without using booleans.

The piece you see is set to 512 Unity units - so four of those would be close to the 1000 units you specify. That piece has approximately 4000 quads - so four yould be approx 16,000 quads.

Adding the tunnels would not be that difficult using standard extrusion techniques.

cheers, gryff

 

Hi gryff,

After a few more days looking around, I've decided to put a few weeks aside to get to grips with Blender, it had to happen at some point! Thanks for the advice gryff.... and after only a day I have 'caves' and a landscape. They don't look great but it's a start!

 

That's what I was going to suggest. It's easy to create cylinders and extrude at odd angles and then stitch together you cave network...

 

There is actually a very neat little addon that can be activated - the "Add Mesh -> Pipe Joints" addon.

You can make bends, Y-joints, X-joints, etc. Then you can use the lattice or displace modifier to add noise or further bends.

The first image above was created using that addon.

The hard part is texturing some of the joints.

cheers, gryff

 

Thanks...

 

Just had a quick look at the pipe joints add on and it looks to be very useful! To tired to give it a serious go, but tomorrow is clear so fingers crossed! Thanks!

 

UFO - Let me know if you need tips on using the "pipes" addon - I've used it a fair bit ;-)

cheers, gryff