PART 1

This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of the toolset up to this point and will point out how to make you landscapes look a little more realistic.

The idea here is to convert a basic landscape into a misty forest road.  The idea behind this land is a rocky wooded area that serves as an opening scene to the module Caer Runek.  I will hope to show you how to make things look more realistic using the fewest resources.  I will also show you a few tricks to making things easier for you.

Here is the basic set up.  I have molded the land to include a road (going from left to right over the bridge), a stream, and several bumps and ridges that will serve to a) make the land look more realistic, b) make it easier on you to hide things from the player and thus cut down the time you actually have to spend making a single area.

Through this athstetics tutorial I will covert this blob of bumps into a realistic looking woodland road.

Of course, the time you spend on an area is proportional to the quality you will get out it.  Making detail tweeks will help in the long haul.  Dont be afraid to spend a little time on the finer details.  Dont just paint some textures, plop down some grass and placeables and assume this will look good.  You can get away with a lot without the heavy use of placeables and textures.

In this tutorial I have filled the area with the texture TT_GG_Grass_09.  It has a little bit of grass and a muddy-dirt feel to it.  Great for making an organic land.   I have placed down the bridge already because it was needed to measure the width and depth of the stream.

TEXTURING
1) Rocks
2) Natural Shelves
3) Grassy Grass

The first step is to texture this bad boy.  Lets start with rocks.  You can make large natural weathered boulders jutting out of the earth without the use of placeables.  Lets use TT_GG_Cliff_04 for the rocks in this case.  It has a lot of character for woodland rocks (mossy looking, kinda broken up).

These rocks were created with a medium 50% Pressure RAISE brush by single clicking in a circle to raise them up -- and then using a medium 50% pressure SMOOTH brush (Again single quick clicks -- dont hold down the button) to get rid of the jagged surfaces (get rid of these when you find them - they are evil).  So, likewise when using the rock texture, use a medium sized brush at 50% pressure.  Single click the texture brush right over the top of the future rock (see above picture).  The texture should fit nicely over the rock and not spread to far off of it.

The rock will look a little dull.  But we're gonna make the top of it a little brighter to bring it forward and give it more presence.

Turn up the texture brush pressure to 75%.  Redude the size and outer brush by 1 (so they are 5 and 5 and not 6 and 6).  Place the brush over the top center of each rock and click down one and the middle of the rock should be brighter.  Only the highest portions of the rock should get brightened, while the rim around the rock should remain dull.  This gives your boulders a lot more life and will stick out.  Alternatively you can set the pressure up to 100% and create a smaller ring of brightness to make them really stick out.

Now repeat this with every rock in your woodland and we'll move onto grass shelves.

TIP #1: If you are positive a player will never see a texture on a side of some scenery -- don't paint it.  It will save you some time.  No need to work on parts you are sure the player will never see.

Tip #2: Do everything in large steps.  Such as doing the dull texture of all your rocks first and then go back and do the highlight pressure on the rocks again.  This way you dont have to keep going back and forth switching brush properties.  Of course, this requires forsight -- but dont be afraid to go back and do something or add some extra oomf to a texture.

Tip #3: Dont make landscape boulders too huge, they will loose the finer detail if you have to spread the texture around too much (players will see the repeat pattern in the texture - - which makes landscapes VERY ugly and drool.

Tip #4: For larger boulders (again -- not to large) you may have to tap the texture brush around the bump to fill it in.  Stick to a medium sized brush.  Dont let the texture touch the ground -- we'll use that area for edging.

Tip #5: The key to natural texturing is to let the textures drape and fall onto the surface.  The best way to do this is to single click them on.  The edges will come out a little faded and blended into the ajoining textures.  However, there are times where you might want a strong edge and in this case, set that pressure to 100% and hold down the button instead of lightly clicking on the spot.

After you are done with texturing the rocks and creating the brighter highlights on the highest part of the rocks, you should end up with a scene like this;

One thing I have done here is create some scenery in the stream that will block out some of the distant view for the player.  As the scene grows, you'll see why.

Next, we move onto grass shelving.  In our scene, there will be a little grass. Mainly along the road.  Why? Because, grasses mainly grow in direct sunlight (it is actually a fragile plant in this respect).  Grass tends not to grow under trees (but weeds and other low sunlight plants will).  Be sure to set your texture brush size to something slightly smaller than the shelf space you are working on with 50% pressure again.  Select the texture TT_GG_Grass_28 and lets paint!  This texture is bright which allows us to do a lot with it later.

Let the edge of the texture drape slightly over the edge of the shelf, but do not let it run down the entire slope or wall. Just like with the rocks, turn the pressure up and create highlights with the texture leaving a dull edge.  You should have something that ends up like the above picture.

The upper shelf as the completed highlights, while the lower is unfinished.

A couple of things of note here. 
1) Break up the monotony.  greate little clusters of grass on these shelves rather than one continuous line.  This makes it look a lot more natural and less processed.

2) In certain spots let the texture drape over a little more.  Sometimes grass just loves to hang.

Now any flat surfaces along or near the road, do this type of texturing with the grass.  Remember, blotchy blobs of green -- don't make it all solid and repeatative.

Tip #1: Try to drape the texture like you did with the rocks, use the highest areas in the shelves that are availible for grass.  Grass likes to grow in flat areas and doesn't like slopes all too much (as it doesn't get as much sunlight during the course of a full day when the sun moves).

Tip #2:  Adjust the size of your brush as you encounter smaller and larger flat surfaces.  You want to fit the grass to the surface as best you can.

After you've done that, here is what you should end up with;

It still doesn't look like much of a forest yet.  There is still much to do however.  For now lets paint down the road.

You should know that a well travelled road like the one in this forest should be sunken into the ground.  If it is a wagon trail, the center of the road should be slightly raised to denote the wheel ruts.  The wheel ruts of course, should be darker than the rest of the road texture.

You have a couple of choices here.  You can either use a road texture (depending on your preference or you can color the current texture (which is more optimal as we dont have to use a 4th texture).  Since I'm already going to be concious elsewhere, I'm going with another texture.  A dry dirt texture.

Well, thats all for part 1.  The basics for the area have been laid down.  Used 4 textures (even though I didn't need to).  Next I'll move into Terrain coloring and Grass layout, and in part 3 I'll start plopping down some placeables and water to fill out the land and start making it look like a deep forest road.  Look for tutorial 2 on Wed.

PART 2 - Coloring the terrain

The goal here is to add a little life to your area.  Coloring is the tool you want to use to accomplish this. You have to remember though, the colors will generally only darken the textures you are using.  If you want to lighten textures you will have to use different pressures of the texture itself as demonstrated in part 1.

Since we're working with a forest, we will want to stick to natural earthy colors.  This means avoiding most of the bright colors.  Shades of brown, greens, and greys are earthy colors (heh, and this is usually a challenge for me because I'm color blind - thankfully everything is labeled for me).

All the colors I will use are found on the default color pallette.

We'll start by edging the road and then we'll move to edging out the grass shelves.  The color I am going to use is called Pale Warm Brown (RGB = 198, 156, 109, located second to last row on the right side).

Once again, apply single click drawing like we did with the textures to achieve this effect.  Set the brush to 1-1 (Size/Outer) and a pressure of 50%.  Go along the edges of the road till you get an effect that looks sort of like;

You should notice the difference between the left and right sides (right side is darker now).  It creates a deeper feel to the scene already.  Do be afraid if when you draw back the scene looks wierd.  It's going to look off for a while until all the coloring is done.

Now edge your road the same way along the whole path and we'll get to the grass shelves.  Dont be afraid to let the color drift off and fall onto the road and grass textures a little.  This just helps the effect.  Dont be afraid if you create lighter or darker spots, this just adds to the scene in the end and you'll be happy with the results.  The key here is bledning one texture to another anyway.

NOTE: Sometimes the color brush will not lay down the color, especially around steep rises in the ground.  Just move the brush to another point nearby and try again.  It is trial and error. But I will get to this.

Tip #1 - One thing to try and avoid overall is to prevent the scenery looking like you are using a very perfect (and unnatural) circle.  Which is why you might have to touch the brush down in the same general area once or twice to throw off that circle look to the coloring (or terrain, or texture for that matter).

Now start on your grass shelves around your area.  Select dark warm brown.  Still use a 1-1 (Size/Outer) and between a 50% to 75% pressure brush (whatever will bring better results for you).  The goal here is to make the shelves look like they are hanging a little over the dirt that supports them.  If you have ever seen grass growing near a rock or dirt ledge you will see that it creates a small bit of overhang and shadow.

Repeat this for all your grass shelving.

Tip #2: Place the brush so that the center circle is on the edge of the two textures and the outer ring calls cleanly on both textures (as seen in the sreenshot above).

Tip #3: With coloring, it is advised to take your time and save often.  There is no undo, and you cannot remove coloring in any way that I was able to see.  But it is not the end of the world if you mess up.  There are SOME ways to fix problems - usually involves more coloring.

Hopefully you ended up with something like the above.  I have even gone back and done the edging near the road where a grass shelf meets the road.  Notice too, that there are some odd spots (indicated with the white boxes).  I don't feel these help the scene, so I am going to go back with the pale warm brown and edit them out. 

In fact, I am going to take Pale warm Brown with a 60-75% pressure brush and start edging ALL my textures on all sides. Rocks, tops of the shelves, any inclines or tops of cliffsides.  And should get something like this;

This is done mainly by terrain editing itself, and has very little to do with coloring.  But coloring can bring out these features if you darken the sunken in areas and leave the higher areas mostly untouched.  Remember, single click the color into each section.  I did manage to swipe the brush along the top shelf grass edge.  Doing that will create some interesting effects as well (and will create the darkest possible swath of the color you selected).

Notice in the first screenshot, I have darkened ALMOST every spot on the dark brown/green texture.  Now it doesn't look much like the original repeating texture. Yay for coloring!

Another thing you might want to try is shading the larger areas of grass.  Be careful when coloring flat open textures.  The brush will tend to paint in triangles and squares (as that is what the mesh is made of).  So you will have to make it look as natural as possible with this in mind.  Luckily, when in game the player is unlikely to notice square textures.

With all that we have done now with coloring.  It is time to get the entire area to match up with everything we have just done.  So start coloring the rest of the area.

Tip #3: Once you feel comfortable with how colors and textures come out you can rely less on the single click painting and instead be able to paint however you feel comfortable.  Single clicking everything would me a monsterous task.  However single click painting provides the delicate details and faded edges of the color or texture we sometimes desire.  Get used to a method that you like to use, as long as it provides good results.

This is the results of my coloring.   It still doesn't look to pretty.  Especially from afar like that.  But it does look better when we're up close! And it will keep getting better as we add details to it.

I added a deep deep brown (almost black) color to the stream bed.  I also painted off areas that I am absolutely sure that the player will either not see, or where I dont want thier focus to be in pitch black.  The focus should be on the area inside the Occlusion Sqaure and the rest should merely add to the scene.  Note that doing this, only works in a forest scene
since where the tree line is going to be for the larger trees is pretty much at the black area.

Before we start placing grasses, we'll need to know where the giant trees are going to be.  Because we will need to place them properly and make sure the edge colors around the tree trunks match up.

This placeable is found under Blueprints > Placeables > Nature Props > Giant Trees.  As you can see. They are quite GIANT!  And perfect for a deep forest scene.  I do however wish they included a single version of the giant tree.  Would have made my life a lot easier.

Sink the trees as you place them into the ground using Alt+Left Drag.  Make sure none of the tree trunks are floating above the ground.  Repeat this Around the edges of your woods till almost the entire edge of the woodlands is covered with the giant trees. 

* Try to position them so you dont have to use too many, and dont block the road with them (if you have a road in your scene).
* Try not to let any of the trunks be set into a rock.  Trees dont like to grow out of rocks (unless they have some soil on top of them).  Its okay if the tree touches the side of the rock and perhaps it looks like its growing from the side.   That will look natural.
* Roate the placeable to give yourself different angles to fit the trees and to clear up any repitition in the patern of trees.

I Used about 15 giant tree placeables. I could have used less, but these placeables use A LOT LESS resouces than speed tree placeables (which we will use in Part 3). 

Before doing anything else, once you have placed all the trees you want in.  Select them all the Area Contents list, and convert them to Environmental Objects.  Next, set the position lock on them so you wont accidently move them around while editing other things.

Tip #4: Always set any placeables outside the Occlusion Grid to Environmental Objects.  The reason is because they do not take up any processing other than to display them.  This includes script running and collision (the big one).  Do not set placeables inside the occlusion grid to Environmental object, otherwise spells, arrows and even characters will walk right through them.  Also remember that you cannot set speed trees to E.O.'s, try to use them sparringly and you'll make your life and the life of your potential players much happier.

Here is the issue now.  Your trunks have probably landed in some spots like shown above.  The contrast is far too high for this type of thing.  So what you will need to do is darken the area around each tree trunk a bit.

Select Medium Warm Brown (RGB = 140, 98, 57. Third to last color on the standard pallette).  Set your brush to 5-3, with 35%-40% pressure.  Single click the color so that the trunk looks a little more blended to the ground it rests on.  If you wish, after you are done with that, create an even darker circle inside the dark circle you created to make it blend even more.  The more gradiant you add, the better its going to look.  It just a matter of how much time you want to spend on it.  And as I said at the beginning - If the player is definately not going to see it, and I will add or see it only from afar you can save yourself some time and skip the smaller details of coloring.

The forest is starting to come into being!  And it will just keep getting better and better from this point.

Part 3 will be about grass and placable placement since Part 2 is quite lengthy.  I will end with a Part 4 on how to set up the mood, and lighting to make your labor look like arbor. ;P