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