Terraining Tips and Tricks

Post some terrain advice and things that would make your map look cooler. I'll start it off with some advice.

Most of you know about the 85 degree raised land technique. However, I've seen lots of people just leave the edges straight after raising them up. It looks horrible. Here's how a natural cliff should not look:



Here's how a natural cliff should look:



Doesn't that look much better?

Now for some innovative uses for different doodads. I'm sure many of you know about the tables. If not, you can use tables to make things such as wooden platforms and stairs. Here's an example.

Example

Also, barrels can be used to make some interesting stuff. Such as these stockade walls and bridges.



Well I'm done for now. I hope people contribute!

How do you do that??? What's this 85 degree thing?

Scaling Trees: As you all probably know trees is a kinda important part when making terrains. The ones used by blizzard are just find but compared to the units the scaling is all wrong. So next time you make some terrain enter the object editor and change the scaling of the trees to something like 1.8 making them look much more natural.

Wisps : Kinda lame trick actually and will probably just work well for those "just to take a screen-shoot" terrains.
By scaling the NE unit Wisp to giant size you can create a kinda neat looking sun.

In game view : If you don't know this already these is a simple trick in WE to see the in game view, meaning fog,light and none of those "cubes" that some doodads use.
To use this simply press the "V" button.

Leaning Doodads : Some doodads tend to become "flying" when placed on hills, I especially think about rocks which I often see hovering above the ground. Easy way to fix this.
Enter the object editor and change the "max angle" of the rocks to "90" meaning they can lean up to vertical. In some cases this might be to much and you might have to reduce it to something lower.
When you now places your rock on a hill you will see the rock laying perfectly to the ground.


Great idea Beam to start this thread, Everyone who feels like it might add "anything" and I may gather it all up to one big post later on.

Some stuff I did, I don't really like any of them... at all...

Sun well is just a lightning bolt... nothing to creative...
The total darkness in the blight is lily pads tinted pure black for an abyss effect, barrels are a wall, but Beam did much better job than I did. World tree as a burning tree used page up to get the fire further up. Bottom right is a tall tree, I used the normal destructible, then made a doodad with its model and used CTRL + Page up to make it seem tall. Bottom left I tinted lily pads darker as leaves...

Just some ideas.. I was bored... yeh...emote_sweat

My brain is racked for tips but heres one...ill get more later
If your a newb dont PASTE Doodads such as flowers click and place them.

What's wrong with copy'n'pasting?

If I'm not mistaken he means don't click / drag around the map with doodads, and don't use the giant brushes when placing them. It looks, erm, unnatural.

EXACTLY>>>>>>COPY AND PASTEING DOODADS REALLY SCREWS UP A TERRAIN>>>HMMMM SO MANY TIPS TO GIVE BUT DONT NO WHERE TO START>>>ILL GET BACK TOO YAemote_sweat

may I ask how you did that barricade with the barrels?

To make the stockade wall, make a custom doodad, change its model path to the barrel, change the pathing to mushroom, and change max size to 20 or so and min size to 0.1 and then place your new doodad and change the x,y, and z values. That was a really long sentence.