I think it's also important to keep in mind that you're not trying to realistically reproduce a landscape, but rather a smaller, more exaggerated version of the landscape, kinda like how a cartoon character is a small, exaggerated version of a person. So you have more terrain variety crammed closer together, with steeper cliffs, more undulant plains, bluer oceans, and windier roads. (If you know anything about Chinese or Japanese traditional gardens, this is exactly what they do, recreate a whole continent of terrain in miniature).
To sum up and expand on the excellent tips above:
1) Varied elevation is key. Only artificial surfaces (and salt pans) are completely flat. I like to use the flatten tool to paint down different layers of terrain at different heights, just like a topographic map, and then use the smooth tool to erode everything down. Any flat spot left over, go over it a bit with either the raise/lower brush at 20%, and then smooth it again.
2) Details count. Look at a real landscape, and find at least one little detail you can copy, like the snow drifts mentioned above. You want to give the player something they can immediately recognize as belonging in a real landscape.
3) Interrupt patterns. Human eyes are great at finding patterns, which we immediately impute to some sort of artificial design. In the toolset, the biggest problem is the textures, which repeat in neat tiles. You have to interrupt the repetition of the textures either by mixing textures, interspersing different textures, using the color tool, or adding in other objects. You can also use misdirection; a deer trail through the grass will give the eye something to look at, a pattern to recognize, besides the tessellating texture of the grass. Likewise, any objects or trees you put into the area need to be randomized. You can't rotate trees, and you should only use a handful of different seeds, but you can resize the trees, and subtly alter their proportions.
4)Fractal detail. Fractals are those funky computer images that look the same zoomed in and zoomed out. Basically, detail or patterns get replicated both on the small scale and on the large scale. Think of a tree, where the big branches fork in exactly the same way as the little twigs. Fractal patters are actually what people recognize as 'natural' or organic. In the toolset, this boils down to making big details and little details, and having the big and little details mimic eachother. So you have big cliffs and small cliffs, big bends in the streams and little crooks, a big house and a little shack. In usually monotonous areas, like grasslands or forests, you need to have both a big landscape feature that dominates the whole area, and smaller features that individualize separate sections. Basically, you want to make sure that the player always has something small and interesting right in front of them to look at, and something big and interesting way off in the background to look at. Done well, the small detail helps the viewer understand the big detail, like a boulder helps you wrap your head around what a mountain is.
5)Make sure to change the lighting. There are a few lighting presets on the vault, enough to get you started. The defaults are terrible, and make everything look fake.
6)Keep scale in mind. You might want to place a creature down in the area while you're building, just to remind yourself how big exactly everything should be.
7)A little bit of grass goes a long way. Set the brush to 10%, small size, and just click here and there, don't hold the button down. Put a little down next to buildings and other placeables, to break-up their hard lines, and in tufts in open, grassy areas to give some relief.
8)Build each area with a particular mood in mind, and keep things simple.
Modifié par Lugaid of the Red Stripes, 05 janvier 2012 - 05:07 .
Maybe these things are some fundamental details of level designing, but Ive never done anything in a map editor except NWN1, which was well... Pretty limited when it comes to environments/graphics.
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