Terrain Part Two Now we know how to get terrain to show up in the editor. But flat terrain with one texture on it is no fun! In this part of the tutorial I will teach you how to use the terrain editing tools to shape our terrain and optimize it for gameplay. Terrain Properties There are two properties in the TerrainInfo that we need to look at before we start getting into the tools. Double click on the TerrainInfo actor and open the TerrainInfo tab. Inverted If set to True, the terrain will be upside down, useful for making cavern ceilings etc. TerrainScale This is the setting I mentioned earlier where you can change the grid size of the terrain if you need more precise control over it. These numbers do not need to be powers of two, but it is best to keep it that way for ease of editing and alignment. Terrain Manipulation Now we're going to take a look at the tools we can use to manipulate our terrain. Click on the Terrain Editing button and take a look at the top section of the window. In the left selection box are our tools, which will be discussed in turn. The middle section has options for adjusting the radius and strength of the tools. On the right is the Soft Selection box which I will discuss in the Vertex Selection tool, and along the bottom and top are a few options which we will discuss now. Per Tool? Clicking this option lets you keep each tool at its own setting. Leaving it unchecked will use the same setting for all the tools. Undo Non-functioning or buggy. This button would make using terrain WAY too easy anyway. Ignore Invisible Quads Non-functioning. Mirror Mirrors all of your actions to opposite sides of the terrain, depending on which one you choose. XY mirrors it to all three other quadrants, and all of them use the TerrainInfo actor as the center point. Terrain Editing Tools Vertex Editing This tool lets you select vertices of the terrain to move up or down. As you move your cursor over the terrain in the 3d view you will see the tool follow the terrain, showing you the inner and outer radius. Adjusting the inner and outer radius affects the vertices that are selected and how much they will be affected. This tool uses Soft Selection, meaning while all of the vertices selected in the Inner Radius are affected with the full amount of the Strength setting, the ones between the Inner and Outer radius get affected less and less toward the Outer Radius. To use this tool, simply click on the terrain in the 3d viewport (it might take a few clicks for the editor to figure it out), then hold Ctrl and both mouse buttons, moving the mouse up to move the vertices up and down to move them down. In these pics you can see the effects of moving them at different strengths. As you can see, the vertices in the Inner Radius all move to the same height. If you want to move more than one set at a time, simply fold Ctrl and click somewhere else to add more vertices to the selection. Keep in mind that every time you click to add more, it will treat the ones you have selected as an inner radius, and your previous selections will keep expanding. If you deselect Automatic under Soft Selection, it will only select one vertex at a time. Using this method you can select as many individual vertices as you want, then click the Select button to have it soft select from those points. Select This tool lets you select an area for random terrain generation. With this tool selected, hold Ctrl and the left mouse button, and drag over an area to select it. Once you have an area selected click on the Misc tab at the top of the Terrain Editor to bring up the Terrain Generation menu. Here you can adjust the number of Steps, which is like the distance between the points of noise, and the Strength, which varies the height of the terrain. You can also check the Use Entire Heightmap button, which ignores your selection and generates random terrain on the whole thing. Painting Painting lets you raise and lower the terrain with brush-like strokes in the 3d view. Holding Ctrl and the left mouse button raises the terrain, while holding Ctrl with the right mouse button lowers it. The higher the Strength, the faster it will raise the terrain, so you might want to keep it at a low value to start with until you're used to it. The Paint tool acts similar to Vertex Editing, sloping off from the inner radius to the outer radius. Also, the Paint tool is affected by the Adjust value, which acts similar to Strength. But be careful! Set it too high and your terrain will blast up out of control: Smoothing Smoothing gets rid of jagged edges and spikes in the terrain. It is only affected by the Outer Radius. Putting the Strength at low values makes the smoothing slower, so you can control it easier. IMPORTANT NOTE Some people have problems with the editor crashing when the Smooth tool is used at the edges of the terrain in UT2003. I have never encountered this problem, it might have something to do with the OS or the most recent patch you have installed for the game. On Windows XP the editor is extremely stable, and you most likely won't encounter this error. The best thing to do would be to download the latest patch, then try it and see if the editor can handle it. Noise This tool is similar to the Terrain Generation tab. It makes random changes to the terrain in the Outer Radius. Setting a higher Strength makes faster changes to the terrain, having a higher Adjust value makes it change faster as well. Flatten Flatten takes the height of the vertex in the center of the selection tool and makes all the vertices in its radius the same height. In this pic I have taken a vertex halfway up a hill and flattened out an area around it and partially into the hill: Visibility This tool is used to make parts of your terrain invisible. Since it also gets rid of the collision in those places, this can also be used to poke holes in your terrain for caves etc. Right click and drag your mouse to make terrain in the Outer Radius invisible, left click and drag to make it visible again. This tool should be used to get rid of excess terrain, for example terrain outside of the subtracted world space or hidden behind static meshes, as in this pic from BR-IceFields. This makes terrain faster to render since it will not have to render parts that are invisible. Edge Turn This tool flips the diagonal edge in the grid spaces within the Outer Radius. This is useful for the sides of hills that go against the line direction, to make them smoother, as in the following example pic: In part three of this tutorial, we will finish up our look at terrain by adding texture and deco layers, and taking a look at their properties. We're almost done! Continue to Part Three of this tutorial