First off, welcome to the Burled Wood Blog!!
For my first of hopefully many tutorials, I decided to do something kinda simple, yet quite effective in adding a bit of life to you claim. I had originally planned on doing one on creating and blending in land to your claim, but I thought that might be a bit of a long-winded one to kick things off with.
This time around, I'm going to show you something I just came up with while traipsing around in my little corner of the continent (Lib/Knob, btw!). So, with that said, lets get going with....
Lesson 1: A Path to Nowhere
Okay. First, the essentials. These are the primary tools that I used while working on this, and it would probably behoove you to have these in your arsenal:
Building Tools:
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Selection Tool - Much easier to build with than placing single cube voxels, and allows the creation of templates (Including boulders, plants etc!)
Smoothing Tool - Does what it says, and necessary for natural looking landscaping
Paint Brush - We'll be using this extensively in this tutorial, so if you don't have one yet, then you won't be progressing much farther in this lesson!
Heal Tool - This comes in super handy, especially when combined with the selection tool.
Props:
Lamp Post - Not necessary, but adds a bit of ambiance to our path we'll be making.
Templates - Boulders, flowers, ferns, trees, etc. Really helps to have an arsenal of these, as they can really breathe life into your build. Again, not necessary, but nice to have laying around.
Preparation is Key!
Alright, so lets get to it! The first thing I like to do is to get rid of that obtrusive claim box. I start feeling kinda claustrophobic if I leave that on while I'm inside my claim. Its also pretty annoying when your camera swings outside of the box, and you end up looking in on your claim through a giant blue filter. So what I like to do is place some markers at each of the corners of my claim like so:
This helps you still maintain a visualization of where you can and can't build, while keeping that "wide open spaces" feeling we all love.
So go ahead and place a pillar at each of your corners. Its okay, I'll go ahead and wait here till your done....
...Got it? Awesome! Lets press forward. Now, at this point, you've got your corner markers, so the only thing left is to shut off the claim box. If you're not sure how to do that, all you gotta do is hit 'Esc', and un-tick the check mark labeled "View My Claims" as shown below:
At this point we want to make sure we also have the templates we're going to need later on in the tutorial. Find yourself a nice boulder on your claim (if you don't have one, you can skip this part. Its not necessary, but adds a nice touch). Break out your select tool and make a selection box around the boulder, adjusting the size where required to ensure the entire boulder is within your selection. Now, once its selected, hop over to the material and shape selector on the left size. At the bottom, there should be an icon that looks like a house. Go ahead and click that, and then click on "New". A window should pop up in the lower right hand side of your window. Go ahead and punch in a nice descriptive name for the template you're creating. "Large Boulder" would work. So would "Big Ass Rock". Or, my favorite, "Greater Boulder of Annoying Invincibility". Alright, hit okay once you've named it, and BAM! You've got yourself a sweet-ass boulder you can place over and over and over and over and over again. Seriously. Try it. Stack 'em high. Move 'em around. Spin 'em. Once you're done, I'll be waiting in the next part....
Set It in Stone
Nice...so by this point you should have all your tools ready to go, crafted up some lamp posts (or whatever you'd like to utilize to illuminate the road), made your templates of props from the world you want to utilize, and have a general idea of where you'd like the path to run. If you don't, take some time now to look around your claim and decide where you'd like it to go. Here is the general idea of how I'd like my path to run:
So, now that we've got all that taken care of, its time to do some painting! Go ahead and activate your paint too (the one that looks like the blue paintbrush. If its not in your hot-bar, open up your inventory and drag it from there to an open spot. If its not in your inventory, then you may want to go back to the beginning and read again!)
Now, there are 2 different modes for the paint tool (as well as the delete, smooth, and heal tool). The first and default mode is the scale mode. In this mode, rotating your mouse wheel forward or back will increase and decrease the size of the brush. The 2nd mode is activated by pressing 'Shift-Tab' while the tool is active. This puts it into what is called 'Terrain Offset' mode. In this mode, scrolling your mouse wheel will raise or lower the tool based on the surface that it is currently resting on. The tool typically starts out about half-way into the ground. Scrolling your wheel forward will raise it, and scrolling back will lower it. This is a good way to cheat the system and get a smaller contact-patch when paining in spots that you don't want giant globs of material placed on.
For now, just keep it at the default level. The first thing you'll want to do is set the material you want to use to paint. A super-slick way to go about doing this, is to press and hold 'Alt' while the tool is active. This will make the cursor turn into a small white box with an arrow pointing at it. While holding down Alt, move the cursor to a material in the world you'd like to paint with and click your left mouse button. (I chose the rock material that I was standing on to start with). The only caveat to this is you must have the required material available from your inventory. So you can't go all willy-nilly and paint in the Yellow Brick Road unless you have all the resources neccesary to do so.
Go ahead and begin painting in the path that you want. Place the cursor where you'd like to start from, hold down your left mouse button, and let her rip! Move the tool along where you want the path, and watch the magic unfold! Once you're done, you'll have something similar to this:
If you make a mistake, just repeat the material selection process and select the material that was originally there before you painted over it (such as grass, in this case). Then, go back over the areas you want to get rid of.
All right! Its starting to look like a path...unfortunately, it looks like someone came in and puked a stone spell out of their asses right on top of our path. Lets take care of that by making it look more convincing. What we wan't to do is start adding in variances in the path. Splotches and patches of grass and gravel will help add an extra dimension and feel to it, making it look like the path has been there for some time and is partially buried under a layer of dirt, moss, grass, etc. Here you can see how much of the path I actually reverted to grass. Depending on the amount of time you want the path to look like its been there will determine how much or how little you will get rid of. I wanted mine to look like its been around for a few turns of the century, so I removed quite a bit.
Its a good idea to start getting used to switching modes and moving the brush up and down on the terrain offset. That way you have more of an inconsistent look while painting, adding to the convincing feel of your build. Once you're comfortable with the amount of stone popping up from the grass, try to find a git of gravel on your claim. If you look at the lower left hand corner of the previous image, you can see a patch of gravel that I used to sample from. Make that your current material and begin painting in some gravel to break up the stone and grass. My reasoning behind doing this, is that if the path is used relatively often, the dirt will still be covering the rock, but grass growth in the well-traveled area will be minimal. Go ahead and add in grass spots here and there as well to help add to the overall look. Its all in the details! And remember to vary your brush height and sizes! Non-uniformity is key here!
Here's what I've got so far:
Another angle:
Man, this is looking awesome! I don't know about you, but this beats grinding burled wood any day!! Alright, grab a drink and a snack, and lets get ready to add in some small details! We'll start by placing a boulder, add in some ground to help it blend in, add a bit more gravel and grass material around it, and then add in some props. Hopefully you went ahead and made a template of some boulders already (You did remember to template them before you deleted them...right??)
Okay, good...so go ahead and place a copy of the boulder near your path by going back to your template window, selecting the boulder you created a template of, and click "Place". You can move it just like you would any other prop, but I suggest that if you want to rotate or scale it, I would place it first, then use the right-click menu to do so, as it offers more accurate scaling/rotating/moving/shoving/pushing/throwing/whatever. I would also recommend that you place the boulder partially in the ground, as to make our job a bit easier when it comes to blending it in with its surroundings.
Now that you have the boulder placed, lets go ahead and get it encased in some dirt/grass/gravel. Grab your add tool, and hit 'C' to change it to the sphere shape. Set the scale as small as it will go, and set the mode to terrain offset. Also use the material picker to select some grass as the material.
This part can be a bit challenging, as the tools are a bit finnicky when it comes to deciding what surface angle its offsetting from, but when you start playing around with it, you'll pick it up fairly quick.
So, lets go ahead and send the sphere about 2/3 the way underground, and intersect it with the boulder, and click. If its placed correctly, it should only be a portion of a sphere that shows up, and it should kind of look like a mound of grass overlapping the boulder. Go ahead and continue doing this all the way around, making sure you vary your offset height to get different heights of grass. Also, be sure to try and fill in as many gaps as possible. You should start getting something similar to this:
Man, I tell you what...this is starting to really come together! Only a little bit left to do! I suppose we better get to it!
Once you've surrounded the boulder in nice luscious grass balls, go ahead and activate your smoothing tool. Set the size to something fairly large, and set the offset about half-way down into the ground if its not there already. Once you've got that set, spam-click around the boulder so it smooths all of the bumps and gaps together, creating a much nicer and more flowing terrain around the giant rock. If you notice any areas that might need more (or less) grass, go ahead and edit it in/out, and re-apply the smoothing process. Another way to smooth everything would be to select the entire area with the selection tool, activate the smoothing tool, and spam-click the selection box. Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to!
You should end up going from something like this:
To something that is starting to be a bit smoother and natural, like this:
Fwew! Alllmost there! Last stretch! I won't go into great detail here, but go ahead and apply the same painting techniques as used earlier for the path, and place some gravel around the top edge of the grass that is surrounding the boulder. Again, going for that worn-in/been-around-for-quite-a-while/this shit ain't going anywhere look.
You should wind up with something similar to this:
(Take note of the ground around the edges of the boulder. Also, a good idea would be to build up some grass so it overlaps the boulder a bit, so you can get some mossy looking grass on the top as well.)
WOW! Now THAT was a mouthful, eh? I hope I didn't completely bore you guys out of your minds. I would, however, like to add a few more things. You know, a thank you to anyone and everyone who decides to take the time to read through this, comment, or even subscribe to me. This is the first time I've done anything like this, and your feed back, comments, criticisms, or hello's mean a ton!
You can always reach me here, or follow me on twitter @JM_Photog or @Burledwoodblog
