Rough Terrain

The easiest method of creating ground in a map is to have large flat brushes. In some environments, like towns or flat deserts, simple flat ground works fine. However outdoor wilderness areas may tend to look artificial with perfectly flat ground. Rough terrain often makes outdoor (or underground) areas look far more realistic.

But how do you create such terrain? One method is to use a terrain generator like GenSurf, that supports several Quake-related games. The downside to using GenSurf is that, using the easiest methods of terrain generation, the result is usually a matrix of regular triangular brushes. Although it does vary the surface of the ground, the regular spacing of each brush still looks somewhat less than natural.

Another option is to create the ground surface manually. In this way you can vary the size and shape of the triangular brushes that make up the terrain, randomising it enough to resemble natural ground.

Take a standard cube-shaped brush and, looking down at the top, move one of the vertices until it coincides with another, so that it deletes a side and forms a triangle. From the side the brush should still be rectangular. With a brush like this it is possible to move each of the three top vertices up and down without affecting the others. From a top view, you can move each pair of side vertices about to create irregular triangles. Then it's just a matter of creating lots of these brushes and moving their vertices so that they match up with their neighbours.

They don't have to have a regular triangular shape from above - you can distort them sideways anyway you like to create a more random pattern. The following example is of a simple mound that uses just eleven brushes.

Side View Top View

This is how the map looks in QuArK. Download the map to look at it for yourself (it includes a QuArK file, a MAP and a BSP). The triangular brush in the centre is flat on top, with the outside brushes all tapering down to meet with the large flat brush underneath. The brushes that make up the mound show only one side each, so the entire mound has just eleven polygons. Yet it's random enough to simulate fairly natural terrain. One feature of QuArK 6.4 that is of great use in texturing terrain is the 'Project from Tagged' function. It allows you to 'tag' the top face of the flat underlying brush and to project its texture upwards onto the mound polygons, so that the ground texture maps seamlessly across the mound. This one feature alone is worth making the change from HereticEd to QuArK. Just make sure you don't change the grid spacing (or worse still, turn it off!) while creating the terrain, or the polygons won't match up properly and you'll have deep cracks in your terrain that will increase the polygon counts. Unless of course you want cracked ground...