TGEA Environment Guide

This quick guide will hopefully answer a few questions to those who wrote me, in particular about the environment pack. There is no secret ingredient to this. In fact, everything is there, in the documentation, in the forums, in the engine itself. All it takes is a bit of work. There are however a few tricks, not too many, but essential in getting all the pieces to fit together. This is not a comprehensive Bible that automagically teaches you how to pull out a realistic environment with a click. It is a brief, essential list of things you need to take care about in order to make Torque roar like a kitten and shine.


Making one of those desert areas can be pulled out with a relatively flat terrain, a bright environment light and a couple of palm trees. That is enough to induce the player the idea of desert. However, there are a few other themes that require far greater amount of work and detail to achieve a good looking, believable world. Often one needs a set example beforehand in order to realize that this or that is actually achievable in Torque. Let us never forget that a game world is, in fact, a screen, like a theater stage; whatever the player / camera do not see, will never require to actually exist in the game world.


The highlands environment example I picked up is not a random choice. Besides some reach fantasy settings, sci fi or not, making mountains other than using the Adjust Height or Add Dirt features on the terrain editing tool is rather rare. It looks like there's a sense of boldness in taking that decision and actually go ahead and model/texture a large chunk of a mountain side or huge cliffs. There was a recent release featuring Material Accumulation and other interesting features in a complete Cliff Construction Kit and it focuses more on the shaders, taking the creation of the cliff formations to an automated level. However, in order to blend the existing terrain in Torque with the features on it (cliffs, rocks) it takes a bit of hand work; but it pays off rather nicely..

Contents

1. Introduction

a. Read the documentation

b. Community help

2. Highlands environment

a. Basic terrain tricks

b. The terrain detail texture

c. Large terrain features

d. Huge terrain features

e. fxShapeReplicator

f. fxFoliage

g. Sky / Fog

h. Postprocessing

3. Making textures

4. Editing the materials.cs file

5. Resources

PDF (print quality, 19 pages with illustrations)
Example diffuse (psd source included), normal map, example material settings.

Purchase now from Editmygame.com for 10 USD. It will probably end up as a free resource but as the crisis doesn't bother to leave soon don't count on it before Christmas.