When it comes to world building, what should the first thing to bother with?
I wasn’t sure if to build the environment/terrain 1st or the city/villages
Well if you’re building a large world in my opinion you should plan it on paper first. E.g. mountains here, lake there, village near this valley etc. I personally as a next step jump into terrain, seeing as everything else is placed on it.
well, just pretending the world/island has the concept mapped out, and the sort
You say work on the terrain 1st, but when I place the cities/towns down, I just rework the terrain to fit to it, or just start with flat ground and put the city into place, and sculpt build around it?
I’m currently about 40% of the way through creating a 3km square map of Normandy for a WW2 game. This was my process:
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Create a map in World Machine.
It doesn’t have to be super fancy, but it’s really helpful to begin with some noise on the map or terrain that gives you some inspiration from the start. You need to find some references as work out what type of terrain you want - big mountain views, countryside, swamp etc. -
After bringing the map into World Machine, I found it helpful to create a landscape material with separate painting layers for Grass, DeadGrass, Dirt, Forest Floor and Cobbles/Street. A lot of work went in to getting these textures blending at the right size and looking really beautiful. I tweaked the colours so that they blended and look cohesive.
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My third step was to lay the map out on paper. Try to work out what the purpose was and if it had to have some sort of balance. Think about sightlines and overwatch points (if it’s an FPS). It’s also helpful to base your terrain on real world references. Maybe the Italian Dolemites, or Canadian forest or whatever. Get a lot of photo references that you find beautiful. Look at these photos and try to solve issues of drainage (where does the water go?), of leaves (where do the leaves gather) and of grass (how long, how short, what colour?). You’ll also need to match whatever foliage you’re using to the references.
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Once it was laid out on paper, I put some main road splines down and blocked on the main settlements using the same building over and over. Make sure the building is to scale though. I found it helpful to paint my cobblestones beneath my settlements to give me some indication of how they’d be laid out. When roughly laying out settlements, look out references. Norman towns were largely a couple of crossroads that had become built up over a thousand years. Many have churches. Think about how the people in the village live - do they farm, fish, trade? You largely have to lay your settlement out how it would be in real life, because it needs to make sense. How do the farmers get to their fields? Where do fisherman store their boats? What is the main road in? In answering a lot of these questions, the map quickly fills itself out. Throwing buildings down to block it out and choosing the right road and fence splines can quickly make sense of the map and help you to proceed.
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Once you’re happy with the working flow of your map from a human perspective, focus on large nature. I have a pen and pad that I write down combinations of bushes and trees on to comprise different weights of hedgerows, or different foliage for forest floors. Play around a lot and try to lock in specific foliage for different locations. While you will not be laying grass until the very end, test out what looks good and natural against the trees and bushes you choose. Look at references for all your foliage types. Be observant. Also be aware that the ground tends to be raised around foliage due to the roots holding the soil in place. For my map, I tend to place the brilliant forest floor texture provided in the kite demo beneath all bushes, as it explains where the leaves gather. Painting all your large foliage in will take a long time to do well, and it’ll also not entirely satisfy you - that is okay.
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Once you’re happy with all large foliage and nature props (rocks etc), begin placing buildings and smoothing out the sense of flow. Does the garage have dirt beneath it instead of cobbles? Is the road wide enough for a farmer to drive a tractor down it? Does he have fences? etc. Also be aware that the rocks should roughly match the same rock used in the buildings, as often the local rock will be used in creating houses, bridges etc.
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Finally add in man made props. For my map, this was where you can get really creative. I left large cut sandstone blocks out in fields (which I never would have thought of, but I saw this in reference photos), create broken fences, perhaps some barrels and crates. If it’s a war map, think about how someone would defend the area. In this stage I also create ambient smoke and particles. Nothing too complex, but just small details to improve the map quality.
Psychologically, it helped me to break down each area into a small scene, and then work on that scene until it was as beautiful or as convincing as it could be. It basically overcomes the scary task of painting an entire enormous map.
The process in creating one scene?
- Make sure you’re happy with the roads
- Terraform
- Paint deadgrass/dirt then forest floor, then grass.
- Paint large foliage.
- Paint large nature props (rocks, dead tree trunks etc)
- Test with grass.
- Make sure you’re happy with the scene.
- Delete grass to keep performance high.
thank you for the very detailed post, guess my 1st thing to worry about is making a map to at least help
but I sort of wonder, how do you decide how big to make the Unreal terrain map?
Start with reading these books on your question [PDF] Free Tutorial Guides: Ultimate Level Design and Create a Map in 11 Days
Very good advise in there. Like and good building that need to be fixed up. There is more time in prep work than anything so keep that in mind when you feel like your doin nuthin. Dont overwhelm yourself either. 15min aday on learning is a minimal good goal. Always keep asking yourself "is this fun or what?