Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Mods Total Noob needs help with terrain editing.

The thing is ... I watched all the tutorials at the Larian youtube channel and searched a bit around the web. And it seems like the Terrain tools are pretty easy to use. But my problem is that everything im making looks "not realistic" enough. It just doesn't feel like a real world. I hope this makes sense to you xD because my English is not the best.

Can you maybe recommend me some videos and/or tutorials that explain how you make a good looking terrain that looks like it could be used in a game. At the moment im looking at the original game and I try to copy what they did. But some general guidelines would be rly nice.

Can you describe what you are trying to do and what you feel it is that makes your efforts appear unrealistic?
As you said, the terrain tools are fairly easy, just remember that each tool has settings available by right clicking on the tool button
As examples, the level tool has settings for clamp, height and radius, where the raise and lower tools have settings for radius and strength... By playing with these tools and their settings, you should be able to manipulate base terrain to your standards with some practice
Beyond that, spending some time learning how the various textures work together and adding placeables should get you where you need to be
If you can't get something specific to work, post questions with all the details you can think of

Terraining is quite the art. Check out Mipsy's Ellirian Isles project and his description of his procedures at this thread. I'll post his details right here, though I'm not sure how clear they'll be (I find them kind of hard to follow myself, but they'll at least give you a general idea of how to terrain.)



Terraining takes a long time to get the hang of. The basic idea is to shape your terrain first and then apply textures. Build your mountains, create your valleys, and ensure there's plenty of places to walk around and it's not just a little corridor for the player to walk around in. For shaping, take advantage of smoothing (shift) to eliminate harsh edges. Remember that a lot of the mountain feel comes from placing rocks and whatnot.

For best results, but more work, you'll want to make the map big enough so the player can never see the edge of the map. You'll have to place CameraLock triggers to prevent the player from going beyond the map's bounds. You'll have to have some borders to prevent the player from walking beyond the CameraLock triggers, and try to make these as natural as possible instead of having tons of invisible walls (by painting the AI grid so that the player can't walk there even though they think they should be able to.)

I recommend making a large terrain (at least 256 by 256) to begin with even if you think your zone won't be that big. You'd rather have the space to expand than have some unused space that the player won't end up seeing anyways. It's possible to "attach" terrains to another terrain so the player can walk from one to another, but this is extremely tedious and should be avoided at all costs. It's much preferable to just make a zone, and then if you run out of space, make a teleport trigger (like the bridge from Cyseal to Luculla or a cave entrance) that sends you to another zone or even a whole other level.

For texturing, take advantage of the clamp setting a lot. This basically limits the amount of texture that's applied. Also, don't underestimate the power of meshes (like grasses and whatnot) and objects like trees and rocks to make a scene look good.

An atmosphere can also help make a scene look a lot better. The default atmosphere has shadows off, and turning those on (and changing the pitch so there's longer shadows) can improve the look of a scene a lot. If you'd like to add a day night cycle, I'm working on that and will be fleshing out a good tutorial in my Day/Night cycle thread.

Ultimately, terraining is a lot of work. Expect to put in a lot of hours getting good at it, but when you finally do, it can be extremely rewarding. The D:OS engine is quite powerful and will only improve as Larian adds more assets and improves it, which is guaranteed since they're making two more games with it.