Underground buildings and caves?

#1 If you are trying to use the landscape as walls for your structure then I would suggest that you place the structure on the terrain and shape the terrain around it to form your walls.

#2 Yeah but i need the landscape to over the top of the buildings too

#3 Yeah but i need the landscape to over the top of the buildings too

#4 If that is the case then you might want to think about making the whole level with dif and dts parts and removing the terrain from it all together.

I have tried the set empty on terrain parts but I never got any good results.

#5 Caves can be done with terrain and .difs. A little creativity goes a long way. oh btw, be aware if you are doing this in the design phase becuase when you close it up. It gets really dark..
afterlighting
before lighting

so if you making alot of caves. or a big cave, take into account the need for lighting

#6 I think i understand what you mean but....

So there is no actual way to have terain as say a roof??

#7 Not without some kind of modification with the engine, as it would require 2 terrains interactions. you can also use single difs and create mini caves. ill post a pic later of a example of a minicave. :) i have one in my arena


this is actually inside the mountain.

#8 Thanks Edward...I did manage to work out some kind of underground complex although what I really want to do with my game just is not possible with the level editor no amount of creativity will allow me to do exactly what I want which is quite important ....so brings me to my next question....Has anyone modified the engine to allow what im asking or know of another program that I could use to allow this. as i need multi levels of terrain?

#9 I think, based on what I've read of TGEA that Atlas terrains are supposed to support Caves. But you'd have to use a different tool than the standard top down terrain modelers to create the cave.

Do you need collision on the roof? If not you could model a .dts in a modelling app to look like the mountain/cave. Then use a simple collision mesh to create the interior collision. You probably wouldnt be able to walk on the terrain above the cave, but with clever thought into it.. you could overcome that.

I'm trying to do similar things with tunnels going through mountains. So far what I'm doing is to model difs as the tunnel and cut holes in the terrain with set empty. Not sure what I'd do on an atlas terrain, since I cant see where you can create a whole in them.

#10 Take a look at the Lighting system feature Demo in the FPS STarter Kit. It has a simple underground walkway there.

#11 whups, kinda raised the dead there. sorry.

#12 I am looking for a way to put caves and stuff like that in my game how is it down is there a program to do it or how does it work

tbarlow

#13 What I used to do is set part of the terrain as empty, this will be the hole to go underground. I made a mountain face with the beginning tunnel which connects to the next section of the cave like a puzzle. I use Blender to create these models and export them as Collada.
I recently made a mission trigger to transport the player to the inside of a cave similar to how most games tackle this because the outside world and the inside world will eventually become really big and detailed which slows down the frame rate enough to hinder performance. I still have the entrance with the mountain face and it still has the first cave model connected to this so that it gives the appearance of the cave and as they reach a certain point it will load them into the next mission that actually contains the whole cave. The terrain in this mission can be deleted to save on frame rate as well.

#14 You model your cave in a separate modelling application and export it to DTS or DIF depending on what your application supports. You then import your cave model into the game and poke a hole in the terrain using the terrain tool and position your cave model to make use of the hole.

Note that it is best to model an "apron" on your cave - a wide front piece that can be used to cover any extra space around your terrain opening. Or you can use several "rock" models to cover this up instead.

There are a few free or cheap modelling applications that support DTS left out there, but most have abandoned the older format for COLLADA - which is Torque 3D's primary model format now.

I will try to drop a few screenshots of this process here later for reference.

#15 If you wanted to use nothing but the terrain editor to make caves in Torque 3d:

+) Create the ground terrain in your map
+) Copy and paste the terrain item in the editor

If you wanted to use the same terrain: rotate the terrain you just copy/pasted around and position it above your ground

If you wanted to use a different terrain: create the roof terrain in a separate map, you'll notice the editor shows the terrain file in the terrains item description, in your cave map replace the file name of the copy/pasted terrain as the roof terrain, save/load the map and the other terrain should load, then rotate it around, etc.

You can make some pretty good looking caves this way, you can spruce them up with some cave models you can find online. If you want pro level fidelity however they'd have to be modeled within 3d modeling program.

If you need a step by step process drop me an email: mack@xrucifix.com and I'll post something up. :)

#16 Funny - just as I noticed that this thread had a new post I had the same thought you just posted, Mack.