9 réponses à ce sujet

[kamal_]

Internet bonus points (ie they're worth nothing) if you can figure out how I did this :-)

 

 

[Tchos]

No guesses, but I'm impressed.

[rjshae]

Modified the area file and removed the texture mesh?

[andysks]

No idea but impressed as well . Can you still walk around?

[4760]

For sure it's not from a terrain texture (alpha channel is used for specular colors, not for invisible parts), and applying an invisibility effect to the area itself didn't work.

Maybe moving the castle and trees way above the ground with TerraCoppa?

[Mer1]

Looks neat. Was the missing terrain pushed down or up away from the view or is it still there, just invisible?

[kamal_]

First, thanks to ticladesign for making "The Ascended City" which this area is based on http://neverwinterva...a/ascended-city

The lower half of this area is a modified version of that, with some terrain changes, additional buildings, and the buildings swapped for some of my arid/desert versions with the neon glowy effect you see, etc. The Ascended City prefab put the lower section on a rock pillar, which works just fine for putting something in the air when there is no way to get a camera angle from the outside looking in. Since I have two distinct sections, that wasn't viable.

 

Second, MokahTGS realized that you could use the terracoppa to break out sections of the terrain, so they were disconnected from the larger terrain. I knew that but didn't think of using it in an area before she showed off some floating islands. They floated above a sea or something below iirc.

 

Here's the main secret: The terrain mesh is not visible from below. Zoom out in the toolset beyond what the ingame camera can do, and you can see what's going on. The black textured terrain is at toolset max height. Because it's well above the game camera and you can't see texture on bottom of the terrain mesh, the black terrain is invisible. Thus, while it looks like it's floating in air, the place is actually well below the ground level of most of the map. The two cutouts in the black terrain are where the city areas are. They have normal terrain.

 

So you can build your area, and use terracoppa to rip off and raise the portions of the terrain you don't want visible. I built terrain under the tree paths you see for ease of building them, then since terracoppa allows you to control what you copy from area to area, I only copied the trees and vfx for those sections of terrain, and then copied in the max height terrain mesh from another map. Terracoppa works on a tile basis, so you need to design around that, you can't just freeform cut up the terrain with it.

 

The "walk of faith" tree paths between the city sections are indeed walkable. Screenshot at night so you can see the sparkly vfx.

 

You can do this by making a duplicate of the area, sculpting your terrain so that it matches the walkmesh you want and bake it. Then you can use tools from kivinen and the idea by sgk73 to merge the walkmesh from the one area into another. I did this in Crimmor, where you walk through the air on the Evercarpet magic item and then across the building's roof. Here are step by step directions for doing this. http://kamalpoe.blog...und-be-two.html

 

Here is a daytime shot, things are more visible.

 

A closer view of one section, so you can see the one of the arid versions of the thayan stuff, this is the whitened stone with white self illumination. The stone is tintable of course. The pink/purple is from placed lights.

 

At night, it kind of reminds me of Miami

[kamal_]

Anyway, this technique should be useful for planar locations, spelljammer destinations, dreamworlds, and the like. It allows you to have a long fog/view distance and still not have players see the ground.

[andysks]

I'll be building a lot of planar stuff soon and just bookmarked this. Incredibly unique feeling. Thanks.

[MokahTGS]

Kamal, nice use of the Terracoppa trick.  My areas are actually floating in the player's mind, but yes...floating in the same fashion.

 

My specific tutorial is here.