Good terrain construction and dressing hints please!

Since i am currently discovering the 'joy' of dressing a 256x256 map i thought it may be helpful to mappers if people could post their techniques for making terrain look 'professional'

i think theres no such thing as too much detail

First and most important: Make sure you use doodads. Especially trees. Not only do they take up empty space but they look cooler than just ground.

Vary your heights. Don't make a maze type map that just has the walls up one level and the ground flat and all one type. Don't forget WE, in addition to having cliffs, also has ground raise/lower abilities.

Use all your different kinds of terrain. Don't make big patches of one terrain type. That looks plain. And boring.

Last, but not least, TAKE YOUR TIME. I can't stress that enough. I find making terrain boring myself, but I also see that the more time and hard effort I put into it the better terrain I get out.

Here is the process I use to design terrain:

1) how does it limit / direct the players overall movement in the map?
2) what style / theme would be interesting to the player?
3) how can I make this terrain memorable?
4) what doodads are appropriate? use a lot? use a few?
5) what encounters would be appropriate/interesting in this area?

Here is how I actually paint the terrain:

1) set large-scale cliff elevations
2) block off player paths with cliffs
3) add terrain detail as decided in the "design process"
4) emphasize height changes with texture use
5) add misc details with texture use
6) add trees + other appropriate doodads
7) check pathing! nothing narrower than 3 units!
8) STOP - is my terrain going to be fun to adventure in?
9) add creatures
10) playtest

Here is an example of terrain i created using the abovementioned process. I decided to focus on using "raise lower terrain" extensively to create natural hills. Then the theme of "dry river bed" kind if came to me after I had made my hills.

Hakujin, that looks great!

I use raise/lower exclusively, as opposed to cliffs. I only use cliffs for castle/town walls. Everything else I use the natural terrain tools, and paint pathmap restrictions as needed (i.e., based on slope - too steep = no walk).

Look at pictures of real terrain and try to duplicate the effects in the WE.

Care.

looks really great :-)

other stuff:

1) dont use the "kill this terrain with random heights" tool in the editor or it will look bad /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ <-- sucks
edit the plain terrain manual with the up down tools...
2) if you make forests, it looks just awesome if you make the trees on higher ground (hills.....) and lower the paths abit

Yes there is, too much doodads and not only will your map lag everyone to death; it also won't look much better than if you'd just terrained properly... Also, to cut down on doodads, where there are big patches of forest with only trees, use a line about 3 trees wide along the path; the rest of the trees you can't see anyway! Oh, and be sure to d/l my D&D trailers, though they're quite old (the elder one I made 3 weeks before RoK made their first trailer, so that's somewhere in the first week of August I think).

Well, detail and amount of doodads can be classified as two different things. Yes, of course you can have too many doodads, but you can't have too much detail. Doodads only add to detail, they aren't the be all and end all to making a map look good. As an example, the majority of the posts here have already discussed the amount of detail put into terrain creation, and I couldn't agree more with any of those comments.

As for my own piece of knowledge to pass on, I suggest you open up a plain blank map, get you basic terrain type, and swap around the textures, then see what combinations work well to get a really unique feel to your map. Look at and test every type of tree to see which ones work best, then mix it around with other types of doodads - be artistic, because in a way map creation is an art (wow, don't I just sound like a goofball :ggani: )

Seriously though, I can't stress enough how many ideas spur from using a test map and playing with various terrain combinations. An example from my map below:

if your modifying your terrain after you added doodads and such make sure you hide the visibility of units and doodads to give you a clear look at your terrain.

Just think of composition, I hate maps where people put anything they find anywhere. Like glowing skulls, and flags in the middle of a forest (unless its part of the story).

Keep a certain theme in mind, and like someone said, look at the way blizzard does their maps. There's a waterfall in a map in one of their undead campaigns, which is hot. Oh, and don't forget to activate the pathing, I sometimes use that for secret passages or something.

ANd if your going to use the "noise" in the apply height section you will probably want to also use a bit of smooth after and raise or lower in a criss cross of it i find it quiker than singularely raiseing and lowering

ps how do you edit the pathing?

To edit the pathing you need Zephir's world editor, which is available in the download section (I think...? :bgrun:)