How to make cliffs
by Silver

      I think we all at some state wanted to make an outdoor terrain, but didn't because we knew that the needed cliffs would look like shit. There are many ways to make some kind of realistic cliffs for HL. Complex brushes, vertex manip, advanced texturework. You name it. What this tutorial is about, is how to make cliffs in a pretty easy way. It may take some time to learn, but after that, you can use your knowlegde to make all kinds of different cliffs.

      First we create a brush, covered with some kind of cliff texture, in this case i use the "rck".

      Then in the topview, I clip it down into smaller brushes. The size doesn't matter, as long as the brush is rectangular.

      After we have split the brush into smaller ones, we clip these smaller brushes from brushedge to brushedge.

      Now here comes the hard part. Enlargde the 3D view as I've done it below, and select the vertex manipulation tool. Also select a smaller gridsize

      In the 3D view, select ONE, I repeat ONE of the vertices (points), and drag it a few units down, still in the 3D view. Ref is shown below

      Drag one vertex from each of the other neighbour brushes, and align it to the first vertex. Like this

      Repeat the procedure, down the whole row. In the picture below there isnt that much variation between the "dragdowns", but you can make it as deep as needed for the map. And by using diffrend depth in the dragdown, you achieve a feel of realism. But remeber to make it smooth. else it looks too blocky.

      We have made the dragdowns for the front of the cliff, and to make it look better, we make some dragups on the backside. like this

      proceed the whole row down, and now we have cliff that looks ok. but still needs some work.

      by adding a diffrend texture in the top of the cliff, gives it some depth

      If we take a look at the cliff we have made, we realisece that its still pretty boxed. So now enlarge the topview, select vertex manip, and slightly move each egde from the frontside a little but out. but watch out for errors.

      When finishing the row, you can see that the cliff really looks a lot better, than just a simple brush, with rock texture. And yes try to take a look at the brushwork. Its clean, no overlapping brushes at all. This is very important, cause it results in high r_speed, and in this case, where we manipulate in all three directions, an overlapping brush, will result in a very wierd and ugly structure.

      for those of you who really wants the last taste of realisme, then you can clip over the the top part of the cliff, and "move" it a few units backwards as shown in the pic.

      i know this can be pretty hard to understand, and I dont always express meself correctly, so you could have missed some vital parts. Therefore ive included the sourcefile for the cliff ive just made, so you can see how its done. If you wanna use it as a prefab, plz credit me ;)

      www.egir.dk/files/rck_prefab.zip

      -silver

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