Modular Terrain City Scape Guide

Author Topic: Modular Terrain City Scape Guide  (Read 1479 times)

Modular Terrain City Scape Guide

Mod-terrain can be very useful for designing cities. The rate of build expansion is much higher than standard bricks due to the size and lack of detail. However, the lack of detail is not necessarily a bad thing. You can keep the city looking detailed and exiting with mod-terrain by following this guide.
First thing to do is make sure you’re working with the correct texture. If you’re working with a managing host, he/she will tell you the correct texture, if not then usually go for a ‘ramp print’ style. The default one has a little too much glow so I tend to go for something a bit stronger.
Next, you want to get some inspiration. If you already have some inspirational buildings that you’d like to use, great! If not, have a look on google maps. I usually base a city around a real life city, head over to google maps and use street view to find a nice building which will translate well into Blockland. Usually something quite blocky is nice and works well.

If you’re not building directly onto the map, you’ll want to start out by placing 4 64x64 baseplates down, into a square shape. Using mod terrain it’s important to keep your buildings natural to a city’s plan; creating the same square shaped buildings over and over can tend to make a map boring. Mix up the shapes of buildings, add public areas to towns such as parks or plazas.

Now you want to work on getting the right foundation to the building. You want to use this as a plan for the rest of the building, try and keep a 4x grid. Remember to ALWAYS conserve bricks. A 4x cube is the same height as an 8 ½ cube or a 16 ¼ cube.
When I first used mod terrain, I noticed a horrible glitch, where the 4x bricks can be built inside the standard mod terrain pack (this was very annoying as I couldn’t build all my maps in one big zone) however, we can use this glitch to our benefit and fill gaps in which are smaller than 4x.
When constructing walls, always remember to indent. Nobody wants to see some ugly flat faced buildings. Always indent. This may result in having to use the above method of filling gaps, but your build will look much nicer.

When placing windows, indent them a stud and colour them different to the walls, this tends to make the windows stand out more.
When adding a roof to your building, if you’ve indented your walls a lot you may not be able to easily get a flat roof. Adding an 8x ¼ layer of bricks to the top of your roof will make a stylish and easily coverable feature to your roof. I recommend then adding blocks to represent ventilation units.

I may update this guide later on (I will probably add photos tomorrow)
Let me know if you need any help, PM me or reply here. Hope you find this guide useful.



MOD TERRAIN RESOURCE LINKS

Furdle’s Solitude Modular Terrain Apocalyptic City
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=272573.0

Furdle’s Modular Terrain Grand Theft Auto
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=265279.0

GSF Mod Terrain MegaThread Download Page
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=187620.0




First thing to do is make sure you’re working with the correct texture. If you’re working with a managing host, he/she will tell you the correct texture, if not then usually go for a ‘ramp print’ style. The default one has a little too much glow so I tend to go for something a bit stronger.
This is practically irrelevant. People use guides on what will most likely be their own server or their friends, providing this random statement is pointless.

Throwing in terms that aren't easy to understand when they aren't pictured on a building game:
When constructing walls, always remember to indent. Nobody wants to see some ugly flat faced buildings. Always indent. This may result in having to use the above method of filling gaps, but your build will look much nicer.

When placing windows, indent them a stud and colour them different to the walls, this tends to make the windows stand out more.
When adding a roof to your building, if you’ve indented your walls a lot you may not be able to easily get a flat roof. Adding an 8x ¼ layer of bricks to the top of your roof will make a stylish and easily coverable feature to your roof. I recommend then adding blocks to represent ventilation units.
What the forget is indenting? Indenting can mean a bunch of things, especially on Blockland. This guide has to be straight forward, have pictures and provide basic information. It shouldn't have random facts that most people will mostly likely not remember. Besides, terrain is mostly free-hand and modular terrain itself is extremely simple to grasp and use, even the weakest Blockland builders know how to piece a hill together and slab a couple cubes on top to create a tower.

I don't mean to bash, but laziness and in-completion is no excuse for a guide. A guide is meant to cover most issues/challenges based on what it is, you however, have not done that and haven't even provided pictures.

I wrote this guide and tested in on 4 people an hour before I updated it and posted it. I'll be adding images later on tonight.
And indenting is quite straight forward, it's just pushing the bricks back a bit so you have 'underhang'
I'm sure photos will make the guide a little more straightforward

I wrote this guide and tested in on 4 people an hour before I updated it and posted it.
Not quite sure what you mean here. You asked four people to read this and they approved it or you asked four people to read this and improve their Modular Terrain City Scape skills?

I'm sure photos will make the guide a little more straightforward
Remove the wall of text and covert it into photos and create basic sentences that explain what is going on. That will be much more appealing and easier to understand for everyone.

I mean I wrote a basic teaching plan, taught a bunch of guys what I wrote, then used the feedback to edit the plan and make it into the guide. But yeah pictures will come tomorrow.


woah nice
Thanks!

Didn't have time for photos today, tomorrow maybe after work if I'm not too tired