Depth in playable terrain

Have you seen those tall cliffs in Starcraft 2 and the dungeons in Diablo 3? Well, I was wondering to which extend you could recreate those in a playable WC3 map.

Everything is taken from the "normal" in-game camera.
It's just a rough sketch of things, so don't get picky or expect something very pretty.

Attached the map as well if someone wants to take a closer look.

I've been looking for better cliffs too; I whipped up a custom cliff model to go over the top of a 90 degree slope like you have there, to get the full sheer drop effect.

The last ice one and a few of the Diablo ones look rather strange, but I have to say I like the rest.

The effect is very convincing.

Love the waterfall one the most.


Are you planning on releasing? (I can't model)

I love them, how did you do the fade to fog without making the cliffs super high? There's a fog mode like that?

lol, thread hijacking. Sorry 2-P. :<

Anyway, I've been looking into custo models for this sort of thing, etc etc, and I've just about managed it.

Problem is, so far to avoid serious distortion (since this model is a slope, the terrain does some weird shit to smoothly scale the vertices of the model so the top and bottom match... The model itself is actually a big tall triangular prism) I have to keep the cliff face absolutely flat. Though I'm sure with the cunning addition of a few more doodads that can be hidden.

Here's where I'm at right now:

EDIT: this method is actually a dead end. You can't make terrain-embedded doodads bigger than 8x8 or smaller than 8x4 without it throwing real cliffs around, and you run into shading problems putting anything on a slope down to the right (everything becomes exceedingly dark). Damn.

Hmm is the camera in the game somehow triggered?
Because moving from low to high points ussually followed by camera slowly ascending...

Other than that loved that dungeon(or is it castle?) pics.

I have the UI folder with the MiscData in it in my wc3 folder, yet i'm still confused... How exactly did you make it so you had such a high up starting terrain and how were you able to lower it so smoothly? Did you edit the MiscData values for minimum size or something? (Refering to 2P, not Rao Dao Zao which i know is a model.)

I'm really impressed how this turned out, I kinda wanna test it out more as I might use it for a map i'm making.

Yes, I used that function from Toadcop that keeps the camera at the same height.
The camera would be a total mess un-triggered, due to the extreme height differences.

I just raised the entire terrain at the beginning. So instead of being able to raise the terrain very high, it's possible to lower it very deep. You should of course leave a bit of room to raise the terrain (you might know that the terrain glitches if you raise it above a certain point).
No, didn't edit the MiscData.


RDZ:
That sucks. =/
Such a cliff model would come in handy, could save a lot of time. My method eats up so much time, making a complete map that way would be insane. :P

Yeah, no kidding, but it'd be freakin' awesome for sure. I totally dig what you've got in the first post. We should do a side-scroller like that one day.

The diablo 3 - theme is wonderful, the third picture of it is really outstanding. The others with the cliffs are not bad, but also they are nothing special.

Could you pass a link... I can't seem to find it :/

Pretty neat stuff. Tried it myself some time ago. Didn't get results this good though..

I'm a lazy ass.

Your Diablo shots need to be grittier, just look at all that colour and saturation, bah!

:P

Awesome work here, I'm expecting great things :D