Creating Realistic Environments for the Blender Game Engine

Modeling Continued: Island Mesh

Let's spend some time rebuilding the island itself. At the moment it's just a big round thing. That's fine if your game is about The Far Side, but if you're aiming for something more realistic, we have to improve it a bit.

This is one time when I consider the use of Subdivide to be justified. Add a plane, scale it up a bit, and subdivide it a few times.

The illustration shows the plane after four subdivisions. That should be enough. Now press O or open the menu to activate Proportional Falloff editing mode.

Now select a few vertices and begin moving them. You will see that nearby vertices will begin following them along. You can move the mousewheel to adjust the extent of the effect. Pull up the ground to make some subtle hills. I pressed Z while translating to lock movement to the vertical axis.

Your completed island should look something like this:

Note that the highest points of the island are in the middle, and the edges slope downward into the ocean. This is a actually a pretty good island model, although the steep slopes might make it difficult to navigate. It's also worth noting that some video cards (many Intel chipsets, especially) experience a strange problem which causes landscapes like these to “squirm.” If you experience this problem, simply select the entire model in edit mode and press Control+T to triangulate the mesh.

Modeling Continued: The Skybox

One last thing to look at before we move on to texturing- the “skybox.”

As you can see, the cloud texture is literally mapped onto a giant box. Some people can make this technique work very well, but I've found that it's extremely difficult to disguise the fact that it's a huge box. I prefer to use either tubes, spheres, or planes to create clouds. The rounded edge of the tube or sphere is more subtle than a cube's right angles, and therefore harder to spot and easier to hide.

The tube is a great way to make clouds. It requires a bit of extra work on your part to make its special texture, but the result is worth the trouble. You simply need to create a good cloud texture, then use your painting program to add a color-to-transparency gradient sky color at the top, to achieve a result similar to the image on the left.

Then map the texture onto the tube, and set Blender's world color to the same sky color as the image. The result is shown in the image above-right.

Pretty nifty, eh? Not only does the Tube method create nice, seamless clouds around the horizon, but it hides the corners of the ground or ocean plane as well. A nice way to animate Tube clouds is to make the tube rotate very slowly. The effect is subtle but effective.

The Sphere sky method works basically the same as Tube, but I find that it's harder to map textures onto a sphere, and they have more polys as well. The advantage of Sphere is that it allows clouds to be on all sides of the scene.

The Plane method is fairly simple. You can simply add a plane above the scene and cloud-texture it. When I use this method, often create an object like the one on the left, and vertex paint it as seen on the right:

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I then map it with a black-and-white cloud texture, and set it to Add in face-select mode. These settings create simple clouds which fade out around the edges. They have the appearance of all Add-rendered objects, but you can always change that by creating a texture designed to be opaque instead.

Note that plane-based clouds appear only above, whereas Tube clouds appear only at the horizon. Sphere can be considered “the best of both worlds,” but it's a bit harder to work with. However, some perseverance can get you a nice effect.

One last word about clouds: you'll probably experience some problems due to the fact that faces are by default visible on one side but not the other. You'll have to recalculate the cloud object's normals to make it visible from the inside. In edit mode, simply select all its vertices and press Ctrl+Shift+N. This should fix the problem.

Final Thoughts on Modeling