just one new picture
time to start working on that tutorial
Great terrain is not about having the most beautiful terrain , the best sculpting, or even great painting. Instead, it is about having a good mix ,of terrain and paint, and a realistic look . Basing you world off of real world images taken from airplanes or satellite images from Google earth is highly recommended. This will give you a much better idea about how you terrain should actually look .It is amazing how much easier this way is over the normal way of just dreaming it up.
Most worlds are based of a rough sketch that shows the basic road layout and the placement of lots. I believe that a world should never be drawn out this way . With this method the end result is usually very unrealistic . The world's overall shape is ,oftentimes,very chunky and ugly. Many of the natural rules of erosion and shape are completely bypassed . Where a series of soft hills , with little drainage ditches, should be placed the builder has, instead, opted for an over smoothed patch of overly green grass or ,even worse, a vertical cliff with a terribly stretched texture.A world's terrain should be drawn out before any of the roads are even thought of.
Textures are a very important part of CAW, yet most cawders just use the bland set of default textures. Those textures might have been pretty good for part of Sunset Valley but for you, as a cawder , can do much -much- better. I would recommend searching for textures on the internet,any tiled texture will work with CAW, or just checking out the list of custom texture links here at the CAW forums. If you are going for a truly individual and unique world set your sights on the first of those two options.
Here is a link to a good website with many wonderful tileable textures.
http://www.cgtextures.com/
For those who don't want to go internet searching here is a link to the list here at the forums.
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/181739.page
This is going to be a simple tutorial about how to build terrain in this style.
Everything in our world start with a base; CAW is no different. Before any trees or paints are placed all of the terrain in that section should be sculpted. So far I have done the rough sculpting on our little section of tutorial terrain . I did break the no paint rule by laying out the parking lot but ,well, that's one of the few exceptions. If I were to put the parking lot in after the terrain was done it would not fit in well with the terrain. By putting it in now we are insuring that it and the terrain will function together in a harmonious way .
Here is what it looks like after a little touchup . The ridges are much smoother and the rock is rockier.
,more fine tuning . I laid the path and adjusted the cliffs . It's about time to start painting it.
Here is the first layer of painting.As you can tell it very rough. It shows were the grass ,sand, rock, and road will be located.
We've finally gotten around to laying the separate shades of grass. They should go from dark, close to the water, to light , furthest from the water.
Once that is done it's time to add a shade of green to the mix . This will take away some of the yellow and help define the terrain's shape. Running from the coast ,the green should be placed in valleys and crevices between the hills. I would recommend using this color to bring out areas of erosion .
After the green is in place you should do a lot of touchup in the seem between two areas painted at different times. For this you should lightly mix together a few of your worlds most indistinct terrain paints. Dirt and grass are the only things I used for my mixing.
Our next step is to bring back the sand and rock we covered over while painting the grass. If you're doing this right your terrain should come out looking kinda like this.
Before doing anything with the sand we should first paint the rock. Here is how mine came out . This rock is a mix of four different terrain paints all stuck together.
Since the sand, on top of the cliffs, looks pretty bland it's time give it a little more texture. We will start this by putting a very thick coat of beige rock on it . Almost all of sand should be covered over before we begin the next step. Once the sand is barely visible you should lightly repaint the sand where it was before. The texturing of it should be a little rougher with a noticeable change in color. Next, we will lightly add a little dirt,your lightest shade, to this mix. After that add a little bit of your green to it. You should come out with something that looks similar to this.
There's not much left to due with the terrain except the beach .Here is a picture that shows how it looks after doing the first phase of beach painting.
and after the second
and ,well, I would say this section of terrain is done. The same goes for this little tutorial . I hope you all found this helpful.
