How to make realistic displacments?

blue9075

L1: Registered
Jul 15, 2015
14
3
While working on a map, I'm currently using large brushes for the mountains, as I cannot use the time on detailed displacements in an alpha, I recently thought of cutting up the brushes evenly to make for a large displacement resolution.

But while working on the map, I'm a bit confused on how I will actually make the displacment realistic when I get to the beta, is there any sort of way that mappers use to make bumpy & realistic displacments? as I figure I will be stuck when making displacments, as I will not know how to what to move on the displacment. I hope this makes sense.

If you see in the image below, to the right you will see some mountain displacments as I am talking about, was there any technique he used in where he made the displacement go forwards or carved or was it random?

pl_hoodoo_3.jpg


Another question is, in the displacements tool, is the noise tool commonly used? I figure it might be used to make random displacments. Thanks!
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
Noise doesnt give good displacements at all. its a random pattern and for realistic rocks it should not be random.

There are multiple guides explaining displacements and it heavily depends on the result you want. Some are less ideal to use.

The guide the maker of your example wrote at the time of making that map was: http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=798
He however doesnt like his own guide and wrote a new one:
http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=10287

And then there is again another guide you can use:
http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=24966

1 thing to keep in mind: it requires practice to look good.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
Of all the displacements I've ever done, those are the ones you pick as realistic??
Hoo boy.

It's time and effort. Here's a timelapse of my work on strata:

You can see I spend time incrementally moving things and smoothing corners and edges, in some cases pushing and pulling quite a lot from where the original brush was. I see a lot on this site where people have just pushed in/out from the face and haven't gone up/down or left/right and you mustn't be afraid to do that if you want good looking displacements.
 
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tyler

aa
Sep 11, 2013
5,102
4,621
Good displacements (as YM has shown) take more time than most people (new and old) tend to realize. It really is about practice and simply spending enough time on them.