I'm no professional level designer, I am more of a programming guy, but I'm hooked on creating environments in Divinity Engine. I'll leave scripting for when Larian releases some tutorials about their tools.

Anyway, here are some screenshots from what I was working on today - a valley with (totally unfinished) forest and a branched off road to "oasis" corner.

Overall look, the coast:


The valley:


The entrance to "oasis":


The oasis:


Close-up on the waterfall and ornate chest:


Bonus: view from the bottom. Why would the texture be visible from both sides...?


Anyway, I'm done for now with this level. I like to mess around for a while then start something new. I'm not doing anything serious until the editor is improved a little (random errors, some quality of life improvements on UI), but might come back to this as I want to make a cool looking spooky forest.

Making a forest or generally area full of flora takes time, so I've learned. So many trees, leaves, bushes, rocks to place around to actually make it feel like a forest, not someone's back garden:)

EDIT: fixed it.

That looks awesome, so many different painted textures XD. think i see every coastal stone texture in there! But it looks great, its very pretty the springs you made is very well done - have you used the editor much?

Pretty, hope to see this in a mod

Thanks:). Only 2 coastal textures, and the road stones:)

I've bought Divinity at release and used the editor everyday, so about 6-7 days of messing around. Took a while to learn the UI and all the options. But I still haven't touched scripting side of things. If we can make some custom scripts to do unique stuff in the game (e.g. raise water texture/material in real-time to simulate flooding) that would be awesome.

You any idea how to change hotkeys? like changing 1-4 to select the terrain shaping tools from Raise-Smooth. There are hotkeys for the selection tools and i have seen videos of Larian quick selecting terrain tools with hotkeys. But you can't change it in preferences.

They haven't added other hotkeys under preferences, so I guess you'd have to wait until they update the editor with that, or maybe there's some settings file in the editor folder where you could change it.

Fun, isn't it? Looks interesting, nicely done.

I like it, good job!

I am very impressed. I also wonder how much will we be able to create custom tiles

UPDATE:
I was messing around some more today and made couple of new areas. I'm just basically going on a whim, adding whatever pops up in my head.


Start of the "forest". It's a lot more improved than last iteration




New area by turning left from the forest. Cut-down trees, roots, abandoned house




Close-up of the house. A tree is sticking out its roof.




another waterfall, this time forming a river that keeps going down onwards




I couldn't find any good stone bridge prefabs, so I made my own.




That's it for now.

By the way, most of the textures have been swapped around when I run this mod in game, like the stone road is now made up of tree leaves...
It still looks as it should in editor. Any idea what's up?

those look great!

Very nice Suzaku!

I'm also playing with the editor since yesterday, and having fun with it. Hope they do put more videos up soon

Looks really really good. Cluttering and making sure things look nice before i move on is one of the things i do aswell. When you paint the textures(grass, the dirt road and stuff) Do you just preview some before doing it, or do you have an idea on how itï½´s gonna look before?

Things like placing patches of grass and every small object to make the forest could take a long time.

Yeah I just paint them first on some empty part of the map and check out what cool combinations can there be with clamp tool etc.

It gets really confusing after you start using 10 or more textures, sometimes I have to test-paint them because I forget which one is which one. It'd be nice if the textures could be renamed in the instance painter window. AND it'd be nice if they didn't get messed up when running the mod from the game...

About placing patches of grass and small objects - yeah, this sort of finishing touch takes huge amount of time. I'm still not happy with the forest, need to add grass here and there, as well as some bigger bushes to make it look more natural.

Something you can do to make forest look more foresty is put those wide flat bushes far high in the sky above ground and camera so they cast moving leaf shadows on the ground, and fake a dense leafy forest even when there is no tree doing the actual shadow casting, as you can control the sun to perfection you can create a really tight connection between forest and shadows, giving player the illusing he is really in a forest, and not just walking through a path with forests at the side

Sounds odd at first, but creates really nice (and moving with the wind) shadow effect to split up wide open grass areas visually. And make them look less .. well, painted. Larian used this in a lot of places in Cyseal.

Anyhow.. just a silly little trick I figure may help make even more pretty terrain ;p Editor is really powerful when it comes to this, the amount of density of details you can produce when it comes to nature scenes is very nice, and creates very nice atmosphere

That's a brilliant idea eRe4s3r! I'll give it a try later, thanks.

By the way, none of my grass or trees move - do I have to add actual wind mechanic or something?

You can control wind in the Atmosphere control, under Varia. Can adjust the intensity from light breeze to sharknado, as well as the direction. Another thing you can add is an environment effect, like falling leaves or other miscellaneous flying things, in the tab right under the wind option.

Haha, shame on me, I didn't notice that and I've already been making atmosphere triggers and all that o.o

I like it, looks good! The idea about setting up some leaves out of sight to create moving shadows is brilliant!

Welp, editor just crashed all of a sudden with C++ runtime error, and besides losing unsaved progress it seemed to rollback a bit? LARIAAAAAAN!

Sorry to hear that, but that's what I was complaining about. Better make a save manually by copying the folder to a backup folder, just in case. So you will not have to start from scratch when the editor crashes and corrupts your whole mod!

I guess I was punished for being an idiot and not backing up.

Anyway, I've re-done stuff that was gone. There's bushes here and there, sign posts, main menu background and of course the amazing trick with forest shadowing - thanks again eRe4s3r.

Not much to show besides main menu and how the shadows look like now - compared to earlier this is much better.




Chest, where art thou?

Well, I don't know how, but your chest ended up on my bridge...



Would you be so kind as to pick it up. It may cause my characters to trip and fall down the bridge!

how is that possible...

I found this in the diablo 2 mod thread, which may fix the chest; from Dalto:

"What you have to do for those items that disappear, is right click them and change them to scenery - for future reference."

Yes, that is what needs to be done. But some objects or even characters (animals etc.) do not have "isScenery" or it is grayed out. In that case you gotta change some more stats in the tab.

This is some impressive work. Love the bridge especially.

Dot, you must have learned high-tier teleportation to pull that off:)

Zholistic - thanks a lot, it works like a charm indeed.

I cannot for the life of me, figure out how to add water, like you have. Trying to build a habour..did you paint the water on? If so..what is the name of it.

You can find different types of water planes in Root Templates. If you expand the list to Nature-->Water there's all sorts of water planes.

If it's too small initially when you add it, you can change the scale in the sidebar.

Oh, and there's also water paint in the AI grid window - allows you to paint that surface water your characters can walk on, and I believe it would also be possible to electrify it in the game.

Alright, iï½´ll try it out. tried it out yesterday, and when painting the terrain with water, for the most part it just flicked in and out..like it was trying to apply itself both over and under the terrain

That's odd. I just painted the water on both flat ground and over a mountain and no flickering here.
I know of only the water planes flickering, if you try to place them on the exact same height of the terrain etc.

I find the editor pretty easy to use.
Problem is, my saved terrains keep getting corrupted texture materials, I've lost quite a bit of work this way, notably my forest. Once the problem occurs you can't paint or unpaint the corrupted sections without crashing the editor so I decided to abandon it after much experimentation to recover it.

Some pictures:


I've given up with terrains for the moment and am building a thieves den. Very simple and fun to create buildings.. wish I could say the same about dialogue however.

Does anyone know if you can reset local variables in the editor? It took me a number of hours to realize that reloading the level didn't clear dialogue variables. I could not figure out why my dialogues were triggering almost randomly.. until I re-opened the editor and everything worked.

I am so fucking stupid. The water was just a drag & drop. No need to paint..Thanks again for the help, OP

Lol np. Yeah, the drag & drop ones are called water planes, the water you paint on surfaces is from the AI grid:)

Great progress, I like it a lot.

Thanks, appreciate it a lot!

And sorry for the lack of updates, I'm currently taking break because real life stuff.

Nice work!