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Marlamir

how to improve outdoor designing?

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So i´m just wondering how to improve my outdoor design skills, because i kinda suck at this. for example this area is just empty and boring and i don´t know how to improve.
print screen windows

so is there something what help me stop being sucker in this?

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Well, the most boring thing about that screenshot is that all the walls appear to run on a grid. Walls like that can be pretty boring even in artificial areas; in natural areas they have the further issue of looking, well, unnatural.

The texture choice for those walls is a problem, too. That texture is unsuitable for any surface larger than 64x128, because it has very strongly-defined edges which create an obvious repeating pattern on the wall. Consider using your favourite level editor's 3D preview mode to play around with other textures.

And of course, look at natural areas in other people's WADs and see which ones you think look interesting and which ones you think look boring.

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Give it a more interesting shape than a simple rectangle/box. Use varied heights on the sides to give it a stronger 3D feel. Put a tower or something else that will stand out near the center. Scatter a few corpses or something around so that it doesn't look too empty. Add a river with a bridge so that it's not just a flat ground. These are some of the things I would try to do with this area.

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so better shape and texture with some height changes and river or something like that. nice ones guys, going to study some outdoor wads a playing with outdoor in editor and let's see what i can do

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The solution is as most people have already said - the shape is everything.

When mapping this, think of it from a somewhat realistic perspective - very few examples of natural terrain is perfectly square, so you need to break that shape up to make it feel realistic. Now, in addition to that, not many rocky walls are perfectly flat from top to bottom, are they? To solve this, add varying layers of different heights, and maybe even different textures to mix it up.

Depending on the engine of choice, slopes go a very, very long way and should be considered for use. If mapping with GZDoomBuilder, in the UDMF format, you can draw 'triangle sectors' (that is, sectors with only three sides & three vertices) and manipulate the corners to create slopes. (Here's an example of triangular slope usage)

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Well, it's an outdoor scene where I can't see a single pixel of the sky...

There are lots of things you could do with it, but the most obvious and appropriate one here I think would be to vary the walls' heights. The surrounding gray stone walls can be made shorter than the main building, giving the opportunity to add some visible depth to the scene, and to show more of the sky.

When all the walls in an outdoor scene are at exactly the same height, it tends to look artificial, or like you're down in a hole. It can work if you want to depict being completely surrounded by the same building on all sides (like the nukage courtyard in Doom.wad's E1M5), but for a scene that wants to convey multiple distinct structures (like a building facade and the rocks surrounding it), varying the heights of each structure can help them look more like actual distinct things rather than like different textures in the same square box.

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The easiest way to add some more fidelity to outdoor areas is to add varying cliff heights with trees/burning barrels or even some enemies. Find similar texture families that look well together and give each "height" a different texture every so often to make it stand out a bit.


Another thing you'll see in outdoor areas are little caves, not full blown tunnels but just little indents in the rock with some items in it.


Other things that are easy to add which give outdoor areas a lot of depth is waterfalls/slimefalls that go down to small ponds/puddles.


You can also vary the floor height and give the illusion of layers like you see in Unholy Realms or I'm sure dozens of other wads. You make it look like there is a top layer of grass, then it ends and 4-8 units lower is some dirt or gravel. That way you're not just running across a flat piece of ground.

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Well, the taller building doesn't have any sides, and the grassy area looks a bit cramped on the left, but otherwise that's generally an improvement I think.

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well there nearly no space for wall sides for building so i need to invent something :-) but thanks for feedback

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Have you tried something like this?

Red is the facade of the building that currently exists. Green is the facade extended to where rooms aren't directly on the other side, giving you enough space to pull it back in at some point. Blue is a sky wall, a very thin sector bordering a wall with a sky ceiling and a height of zero, so that only sky is rendered when you look at it. Mark those linedefs "not visible on the automap". Brown is the rocky terrain, with sectors at different heights and stuff.



One common technique when you are using one-sided linedefs as a primary method of creating the rocky borders is to peel certain areas back, and use a sky wall, so that the contour of the rocks have different heights. Example:



The sectors highlighted green are higher than the main ground. I also used some sector-based borders, too. For perspective's sake, it shouldn't be possible for the player to be able to see where the one-sided lines in these areas suddenly stop and meet the sky wall.

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Whoa nice job Trotl, that's quite an incredible transformation! Props to everyone who helped too.

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thanks guys glad you like it, but special thanks go to you guys :-)
and It will take long time to finish the maps but hope you will like them

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@rdwpa

Can you please post that to the tutorial section? I would be a shame if this information got lost.

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Mr. Trotl said:

So i take all your nice advice in mind and i improved to this:

https://postimg.org/image/uwdphpvjj/upload a gif

i´m more satisfied than before, but still what is your opinion?

Wow, so as others have said the final screenshot looks quite beautiful compared to the starting shot, but there IS a vanilla compatible solution to the "flat walls" in this picture I've quoted.







Adding two sectors can go a long way to give building more depth when they're along a border 'fence' in an outdoor area. Create a sector with the same sky height as the rest of the outdoor area which allows the walls of the building to go past the border fence. Create a thin sector along the back of your new sector which is 1 pixel tall and allows the sky to be displayed instead of another wall. Hopefully my weird description is good enough combined with the example images. rdwpa's example is more thorough and I might just be reiterating, but compare the screenshot above to E3M1 of Ultimate Doom to see how much of a difference this simple little change makes.

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DooM_RO said:

@rdwpa

Can you please post that to the tutorial section? I would be a shame if this information got lost.

Why would the information "get lost" here in an easily searchable thread on the very topic that the information is about?

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