Hilly Terrain

When making hills I recommend just working on your skills with airbrushing and blurring. You can do anything by airbrushing and blurring and after a while you can do it pretty quickly. The secrets to maintaining the steepness of your hills is to do selective blurring. I rarely blur the entire dispmap. I only blur what I select.

When I paint up a hilly terrain I just airbrush some different colors of grey and then blur the entire dispmap (except the edge). I then ride the raw terrain and make selective changes. To make your track path just paint a solid color on a new layer where you want your track path and then use that to make a new selection. Then use that selection to lower the color value of the terrain along the track path.

To me it is so easy to do it with Photo Shop or Paint Shop Pro, I can't see messing with Leveler.

Here are the skills that I believe are necessary:

  1. Air brushing
  2. Selective burring (ie. blurring within a selection. Motion or Gaussian)
  3. Layers
  4. Adjusting colors with selections.

Here is an example of a quick dispmap using airbrushing of the terrain. Blurring it. Drawing a track path and then using it's selection as a way to burn the track path into the terrain.

It's at this point that I would then start working on specific sections of the track. If I wanted to flatten a section along the side of a hill and leave a steep wall along it I would paint along that straight in a darker color and leave a sharp change in color along the side. I would only slightly blur it so that it would stay as a steep transition.

Let me add that I spent about 2 minutes on this example and I have never ridden it. It does show the technique that I use and I used it for (Clough Hill, parts of Slaughter Trail, DirtTwister's Playground, Sunday Ride, and G-Out. When I really work on a track like this I will create several random terrain samples and then make a raw track with all of them. I then ride them and pick the best one to use for a track.

Once you have ridden a track and started adding jumps or know where they are naturally you can then remove terrain that you would be jumping over. This is an easy way to do ravines and canyons. You just paint a dark color where you don't care about the terrain. Clough Hill, Sunday Ride, and Slaughter Trails are good examples of that.

Bruce (AMA_DirtTwister)