Terrain - illegal placements - pros & cons
Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2016 11:27 pm
Hi all,
This may be covered elsewhere but I couldn't seem to find it.
I've experimented a lot with "illegal" placements of terrain - mostly trees - to build a more dense/exciting/interesting world. In essence I'm simply placing a bunch of very small trees as close together as possible, and then I change their theme to what I really need, and boom: I've got myself a very dense and more organic looking forest than otherwise possible. This also works great if you place a small tree underneath a surface, and then change it to a taller tree - in this way I can make my hillsides a lot more interesting.
What I'm asking is two things:
Are there downsides to this "hack"? I've found that if I need to change illegally placed terrain later on, the other pieces it touches might disappear.
Are there more tricks like this - do you know of more creative uses of terrain? My (small) complaint with world building is that often you end up with rather schematic, gridlike worlds. I really wish I could place stuff on hillsides, have less regular surface terrain and so on ...
Any input would be very interesting.
Last: I've been lurking for way too long. This is an amazing community and I love the stuff you're doing. Thank you!
This may be covered elsewhere but I couldn't seem to find it.
I've experimented a lot with "illegal" placements of terrain - mostly trees - to build a more dense/exciting/interesting world. In essence I'm simply placing a bunch of very small trees as close together as possible, and then I change their theme to what I really need, and boom: I've got myself a very dense and more organic looking forest than otherwise possible. This also works great if you place a small tree underneath a surface, and then change it to a taller tree - in this way I can make my hillsides a lot more interesting.
What I'm asking is two things:
Are there downsides to this "hack"? I've found that if I need to change illegally placed terrain later on, the other pieces it touches might disappear.
Are there more tricks like this - do you know of more creative uses of terrain? My (small) complaint with world building is that often you end up with rather schematic, gridlike worlds. I really wish I could place stuff on hillsides, have less regular surface terrain and so on ...
Any input would be very interesting.
Last: I've been lurking for way too long. This is an amazing community and I love the stuff you're doing. Thank you!