Starcraft Terraining

8/8/2019 Starcraft Terraining

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Terraining for Dummies 1.0: All you need to know about

terraining

Introduction

Greetings everyone! My name is Mozared and I was asked by payne007 to participate in his terrainingthread over at the StarEdit Network (SEN). In response, I told him I'd do a general tutorial on terraining

as a whole. One aimed at the people who open a map, stare at the empty patch of sand and ask

themselves "Great, now what should I do to make this cool?". This is going to be a paradoxally detailedexplanation of the general idea of terraining.

For some of my work, you can currently look here (or here for some of my older Warcraft 3 stuff), and

you'll see more of my work popping up as the beta plays out and Starcraft 2 is actually released.

Before I start off, let me note three things;

• You're always welcome to send me a PM if you have questions, comments or have anything to

say.• If you end up liking my tutorial and want to show grattitude, then post me your terrain

creations. There is nothing more rewarding for me than to look at a terrain someone has madeand being able to go " I helped that guy creating this".

• The process of terraining I am going to describe up next is by no means 'law'. It is the way I do

things, but if you have your own way of creating order and keeping track of things - as long as itworks, that's fine too. Nobody who doesn't follow my 'line of work' is 'wrong' or such.

With that in mind, let's get started with...

Layer 0,5: Understanding the Wheel

The other kind of storming: pre-initial brainstorming

Before you actually touch that brush tool, there are a lot of things to consider. First of all, if you haven't

already done so, you need to determine what map you are going to make. Is it going to be a meleemap? In that case, your terrain needs to be balanced from the get-go. Are you going for an AoS-style

map? You'll need balance as well, but it isn't as dominant as in melee maps. Are you making a

story/campaign map? Balance isn't as much of an issue here, as the player will be fighting the AI andmost of the balance will be done in the data and trigger editors. The easiest pick here, if you're a new

galaxy editor who wants to get into terraining, is to make a terrain showcase first. That way you can

ignore all forms of 'balance' and can basically place stuff wherever you want without causingimbalances.

First of all, decide what map you're going with. If this is your first time doing any sort of terraining, I

recommend going for a showcase to give yourself an easy time. Note that if you are doing a map that

requires any sort of balance, it might be a good idea to draw the map first. On your mobile phone, a piece of paper, paint, photoshop - whatever floats your boat. As long as you have a bit of a 'minimap'

you can glance back at reminding you where Base A is located and where exactly that creep area was

again. For a showcase, this isn't as important.

http://www.staredit.net/239428/


http://forums.sc2mapster.com/development/artist-tavern/3813-terrain-showcase-welcome-to-the-jungle/

http://forums.sc2mapster.com/general/off-topic/3158-hello-world-introduction-and-pictures-of-my-work/




http://forums.sc2mapster.com/development/artist-tavern/3813-terrain-showcase-welcome-to-the-jungle/




Your Toolcase

One more boring thing to mention before we get to work: your toolcase. I will not explain every single

function the terrain brush has as that should point itself out, but I will touch on a couple of smaller

things you need to know.

• Textures: First of all, under the texture palette, you will mostly be using the 'add texture'function. Note that you can shape the brush in an endless amount of different ways, but in most

cases the standard brush you get will be fine. If you want or need to mix up textures a bit, then

your best bet will generally be to fill up the area with the 'dominant' texture, and then use the'noise' brush to paint a different texture 'over' it. As you'll make more and more terrains, you'll

get a better feeling for when to use the sliders yourself - don't worry about that just yet. The

same thing goes for the Smudge & Blur Textures - you'll only use those in extreme cases to getvery very specific effects. Don't worry about this just yet.

• Textures 2: One additional note here - sometimes, because of the way the cliff pathing works

with the texture brush, you'll find yourself being unable to texture the side of specific cliffs. If

you run into this problem, use the 'replace texture' function, and replace the dirt on the cliff edgewith whatever texture you want. This function ignores the normal pathing requirements and

allows you to circumvent this odd cliff-texturing problem.

• Height & Water: Height and Water in the Galaxy Editor work in a way that might seem strange

at first - you have to place the water down at a specific height, and it will start showing up whenyou use the 'lower' button under height to lower the terrain under the water. When the 'Add

Water' button is pushed, a huge button saying 'edit water' will also pop up on the side of your

screen, allowing you to change about a gazillion features your water has. Most of these arenever used, but 'height' is the one you'll have to fiddle with to get a working river and the pie-

charts you see when you scroll down allow you to change the direction the water flows in,

which can also be helpful in some situations (you don't want rivers to flow upstream, into your

waterfalls).

•Cliffs: Just one thing I want to say here: If you're looking to combine man-made and naturalcliffs, click Tools > Brush > Allow Cliff Merging, or just press Shift+I. Don't fret if your cliff

merge looks dreadful, there are doodad-pillars made just for the purpose of hiding these areas.

• Doodads: What you need to know here is mostly the hotkeys. Control+Left Click makes adoodad face the direction you clicked. The + key on your numpad makes a doodad larger while

the - key makes it smaller. Another option is to select a doodad by either double clicking it or

selecting it and pressing enter, and then manually adjusting the size. Page up raises a doodad

while Page down lowers it, and the , and . (or < and >) keys allow you to scroll throughvariations variations of a doodad (different types of trees, for example). While placing a doodad,

hold shift to turn the placing requirements off, allowing you to place the doodad wherever you

want. This function will be crucial right from the start, if you want to make any sort of decent

terrain. It is also required to place doodads on low (inaccessible) terrain.

With all that handled, we've finally finished the boring stuff, hoozah! Time to move on to the actual

terraining.



Layer 1: Stop! Basics-time.

Cliff Blicchard

To start off, the most important basic of pretty much every map is it's cliffs. You'll want to lower the

cliffs where you planned your valleys, and raise cliffs where you've planned plateaus or mountains. If

you've decided to go with a map that requires balance, then for now, ensure that you mirror the map as

good as possible. Make sure that every area you plan to be a 'base' is about the same size, and that theramps are the same size as well. If you do everything right, you'll end up with a really basic terrain

looking similar to this picture that was taken from an AoS-style map I've been working on:

Doowhat? Also, height.

The next step, once the basic terrain has been laid out, is to limit movement in the places where cliffs

aren't used. For most maps, this usually means you fill up the area with a jungle, mountainous area,forest or even skycrapers, for urban terrain. For example, the doodad "Rock (Giant)" makes for a great

way to make mountains and allows you to 'direct' mountanous areas altogether. Here is another picture

from the same map that shows how I used height variation and 'mazing' with the doodads to make anarea look mountainous. Note that the 'dead ends' can be used for anything - in this AoS map, they are

used to put creeps in, but depending on the type of map you're making, anything can be done with



them.

I'd texture your map

The next and last step for this layer, is putting textures on your map. In my case, I used a lot of rocky

terrain combined with "Mar Sara Black Rock" and "Mar Sara Dirt Cracked" to make the mountainous

area work. In your case, what you should do depends on your map. Make a system for yourself. For example, what I like to do on melee maps on the Bel'shir (Jungle) tileset, is combine all sorts of grass

except 'Shrub', and save the shrub to make a 'line' underneath the mineral line. There is no logic to whythis works, but as long as it looks nice, you've hit bullseye.





If you're doing pathways or large open areas, make sure you have what I like to called "focal points"

for your terrain. If your jungle looks the same all over the place, it generally gets boring. Add an oasis-

like puddle of water. A big rock surrounded by moss. A vine-clad aeon-old temple wall. Whatever youdo, make sure you draw the attention of the player to one specific point, and surround it with a jungle

that 'looks the same everywhere'.

Layer 3: A little bit of pink heeeeere ...

The third layer is generally where your creativity comes out best. I want you to go to the map you're

working on right now, and zoom so far in that you're basically looking at your map from a first-person

point of view. Now, you're going to find additions to make. A loose brick here (in a city), plants for natural areas, vines hanging from cliffs, and all that good stuff, like my favourite Starcraft commentator

usually says. For my mountainous area, that translated into this.



A *lot* of stuff in this layer can be done with the doodads we already have, and you can get yourself

even more options by grabbing normal doodads and making them smaller. Note that you can get

extremely creative here, and (definitely for terrain showcases) can use all sorts of small/large doodadsto build other stuff. A plank is not just a plank if you can turn twenty of them into a rope ladder. Go

loose.

Layer 3,5: YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

This 'layer' really just means the finalization of the terrain part of your map. For non-showcase maps,

you'll generally want your terrain to be walkable. Which is what we use the pathing tool for. Make use

of W and shift+D to turn water and doodads on and off, and use the "no ground" function to remove pathing from rivers and mountainous areas not created with cliffs. Note that a lot of doodads (namely

the "Rock (Giant)" one) do not have an innate pathing layer, which is why you manually need to paint

the pathing underneath them.

For areas you really can't get right with pathing, there is the 'pathing blocker' doodad, though you'll

generally just want to save this for use with triggers (you place them in an area that's supposed to beunaccessible at the start, then remove them with triggers to make the area accessible lateron). There is

also a no-flight zone option, which you'll want to use at places with high mountains. Unless of course,

you want your flying units to fly through the mountains.

Extroduction

And that brings me to the end of my little tutorial. You now have a map with a perfectly fine goodlooking and completely walkable terrain. Time to send it on to that nerd-guy in your team who does

this weird thing called 'script writing', or something. Artistic value - check! I hope I helped you along,



and I hope the first bit of my tutorial wasn't too tiresome and boring to read.

Thanks for reading, and cheerio!

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Starcraft Terraining