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Make a simple terrain in Blender using displace modifier

9

A half-text, half-video tutorial on the creation of terrains using Blender.

KatsBits writes:

Although making a terrain is generally regarded as being the most problematic asset to produce for game related projects, it need not be. Using the "Displace" modifier in Blender provides a quick way to create terrain meshes so long as a few ground rules are followed. The following video tutorial runs through the basic process, making a simple terrain in Blender.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

9 Comments

  1. I have a question about the "Power of Two" rule regarding it's max/min bounds.  Since computer values are stored bytewise in groups of 8 bits, that suggests to me that 256 is the basic unit for texture storage by game engines, and the question it raises to me is what to expect when using smaller size texture dimensions, such as 128 or 16, does it create a usage inefficiency?

    •  Remember that each pixel has 4 8-bit values in itself. As a default, the gpu always stores every texture in this format, regardless of whether it has an alpha channel or whether it's a grayscale image.
      That said, for displacement this is irrelevant, since the displacement modifier doesn't use the gpu at all afaik.

      • TY.  On an unrelated note, Disqus is still being hit-and-miss about email notifications with new comments in subscribed threads, and since my email is picking up all my Facebook notifications just fine, it's probably something on either the Disqus side of things or the way Blendernation is dealing with the traffic.  I'm using a webmail address for both, if that is a factor in the problem.

    • It depends on the game/engine. If you look at Q3 and UT and many early games they could all use 'odd' sized images like that because it was faster to pull in or dump the assets during use. Modern engines/games, being more efficient, trend towards texture 'sheets', so depending on your texture usage you'd have 'strips' set up on the same sheet for that sort of long narrow usage. For general terrain you can't really use sheets because the textures typically tile in all directions.

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