Help with world design

[raney]

I could use some help from someone who understands the entire process of sculpting large terrain, breaking it down into manageable pieces, and having it all connect later on. I thought the Nexus boards might be a good place to look because games like Skyrim deal with very large worlds built from heightmaps. I have a shoddy understanding of what to do after I finish a heightmap, when it comes to loading it into Max and then editing it without totally bogging down my system. I'm somewhat new to 3d modeling, so bear with me if I misuse terminology or am just going at the process entirely wrong.

 

I made a 2D map of what I want the world layout to be like in Paint. The map is 2048x2048 pixels, and I was originally thinking the world would cover around the same amount in meters -- so actually, a much smaller world than in any of the Bethesda games. I kind of wanted to avoid using heightmaps and terrain in favor of hand-crafting from a flat plane with extrusions, mostly because I don't like that terrain doesn't deal with vertical right angles very well, and I want the art direction to be somewhat less than realistic. Nevertheless, I did create a basic heightmap of the world just to see what it would look like, and ran into some obvious problems due to my inexperience:

 

Currently the heightmap dimensions are the same as the number of units in the plane I start wth, meaning I have 1 square meter for every pixel in the map. As a result, every curved edge appears as an ugly 1x1m stairstepping pattern. And it just isn't a high enough resolution to create anything pretty, considering the surface area of one polygon occupies a little over four times the area of the player. Here are a few reference images (I'm using dummy materials right now, so it in no way represents what I'm going for artistically):

 

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/1293/boxworldtop.png

http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/6744/heightworld1.png

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/8240/arrghh.png

 

I know that in the end, I'm going to have to have a larger heightmap if I want more fine detail in the world. The problem is that 2048x2048 pixels already translates into over 4 million polygons, which is starting to get above the more-than-max-can-handle range. How is it then, that Bethesda can make a world that covers 9 square miles, with much more detail than what I can pull off with my measly 1 million polygon budget? I've done a lot of searching, but haven't really found a good tutorial that explains, "This is how you use a high density of polygons over a small area, and then break it up into cells." So here are my questions:

 

- What are the dimensions of the heightmaps Bethesda uses in a game like Skyrim?

- Do they create the heightmap of the entire world or several smaller ones that connect together?

- Around how many polygons does the entire landscape occupy?

- How do they actually go about going in and fine-tuning the world (Like in a 3d modeling program) in a way that doesn't bog down their systems?

- What would be a preferable program to use when making heightmaps?

- If I'm going for just 2 square km world, what are good dimensions for the heightmap? Or should I just keep 2048x2048, and use smoothing to add to the resolution in Max? (I fear that would lead to Max coming to a complete halt)

 

I know it's a lot, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ToyBoy]

As far as I know u dont have to care about the heightmap size in 3dsMax... i think its fitted to the dimensions of worldspace u create... u have to export it in a .raw format, 1024x1024 pixels, name it 0_0.raw and put it in your Skyrims "heightfield" folder.

The heightmap will be loaded automatically in your heightfield editor if your settings of the .raw image of ya heightmap are correct. Then all u have to do is to save your heightmap and you've done.

 

Thats all I can say. Sorry 4 my bad english, i am german.

 

P.S.: In oblivion u had to save ya .esp file first before saving ya heightmap... donno if u have to do same in skyrim... saving your heightmap first before saving your .esp file caused a crash.