About

Remote Shepherd is the capstone project for Long Shot Games, a group of five graduate students in RIT's Game Design and Development masters program. The game allows the player to step into the shoes of a group of vigilantes who have decided to put their skills gained as Marine Scout Snipers to use in cleaning their city of criminal organizations. This blog will track both the ongoing design and development of the project.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Building a Terrain

One new problem with the redesign of the game's narrative path is that the park is not a flat plane like the market was. This meant we would have to generate a terrain in Maya, which is something difficult for myself to do as the level designer. After a week's worth of searching for plug-ins or external software that would let me design the terrain of the park I decided on the program that would best allow me to generate a terrain and export it into Maya: Nem's Mega 3D Terrain Generator.

After experimenting with all the other solutions I had found, I settled on Nem's Mega 3D Terrain Generator for several reasons. The most important was that it allowed the level designer to quickly generate a terrain using some built-in generation techniques and hand-sculpting tools. This program also allows us to export our terrain as an .OBJ files that we can then import into our Maya scenes, a feature I felt was important to have. The designer also has control of the size and number of triangles of the terrain, which is important for us to make sure we keep our poly count down. Lastly with Nem's Terrain Generator the designer can hand paint each face with a texture which is nicer than Maya's process for applying a face with a particular texture.
Nem's Mega 3D Terrain Generator

2 comments:

  1. This looks nice! Does the terrain generator also blend between the textures, possibly with masks or the like?

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  2. No this one does not. I think what we will have to do is break the terrain up into smaller grid sections. Then apply a unique texture to each of the section models.

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