Topic Title courtesy of Tammy; thanks!This is a (permanently paused) work in progress. Help on the Modular Terrain will be appreciated. PM if you wish to contribute.
This guide is a collection of my own opinions and methods regarding built terrain, and is not intended to be an authoritative manual on what terrain is good or not, though it may end up sounding (or becoming) like one. This guide is aimed to both beginner terrainers as well as experienced ones looking to expand their skills. Builds used here as examples are here by permission and have their sources credited. You can find out who built the build by hovering your mouse over the picture. Anything that doesn't have an associated abbreviation text box is built by me.
If you have techniques, pictures, or tips you believe is worth including, please leave a post or send me a PM and I'll put it in. Any and all help is appreciated, and will recieve credit.
In order to make terrain convincingly and effectively, brown townysis of "good" terrain must start in real life. Most, if not all, terrain can be grouped into the following categories.
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- Flat - Generally flat, or gradually sloped terrain. Note that flat terrain is rarely perfectly flat, and may have shallow dips, rises, and steps.
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- Sloped - Hillsides, cliff paths, anything with a consistent positive slope and is steeper than what we would call flat.
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- Steep - Cliff or mountain faces, such as the ones that border the Grand Canyon. Too steep to traverse easily, but are rarely perfectly flat and perpendicular to the ground.
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Most terrain rarely fit into just one of these categories, as the pictures I've included shows. Each have portions of steep, sloped, and flat terrain. To retain a sense of realism, you should also consider your terrain overall before you build. Taking some time to do a little image searching can give you ideas and help solidify the design in your mind. I usually map out more than I mean to build, then select a portion of that map and use it. Considering how the terrain continues on outside of the build keeps you from accidentally designing terrain that is improbable in real life.
Due to the nature of geologic forces, inverted slopes are rarely found naturally. However, when they do exist, it is usually out of reach at the top of "Steep" type terrain, thus making it ideal for dramatic cliff faces or waterfalls. More on this is covered in the
Specific Formations section.
Built terrain can be grouped into two main categories: "Cubescaping" and "Brickscaping" (ie not-cubescaping). Each have their own advantages and disadvantages, which is covered in their respective overviews, and can be subdivided into more specific fields. Most of what's described in this guide fit in one field or the other, but with some thought you can apply them to other terrain techniques.
Cubescaping is a quick, easy, and brick-conservative method of terraining, making it ideal for large-scale builds and background terrain. It also functions well as a foundation for more detailed terrain. Downsides include high detail-to-size ratio, uneven heights which make building on top with normal bricks difficult, and hindered maneuverability without additional detailing.
Required Bricks: Default Baseplate Cubes
Suggested Bricks: Butler's Filler Cubes,
[GSF]Ghost's Modular Terrain Bricks,
Jaxx's 2x CubeBefore beginning cubescaping, though, you will want to decide whether or not you want to cover the terrain with plates that act as grass, which I call "Plating." The difference between plated terrain and non-plated terrain is quite distinct.
More on this can be found in the
Plating section found at the end of this section.
This form of cubescaping is easy to do with the help of
Super Shift (default toggle key: Left Alt). The result is predictable, grid-bound terrain that is brick-efficient as long as you aren't sloppy while building. If you use the 2x Cube in tandem with this style to create walkable slopes, much of the hindered maneuverability characteric of cubescape terrain can be countered, but at the cost of extra bricks.
A really easy way to learn "good cubescaping" if you have visual brown townytical skill is to go play a few hours of Minecraft in creative mode and examine the terrain formations that you recognize, such as cliffs, hills, riverbeds, mountains, etc.
Most of the Flat-class terrain in cubescaping that exists so far is sadly, almost inevitably perfectly flat, resulting in boring fields punctuated by the occasional hill or cliff.
Since cube placement is gridded in Basic Cubescaping , not much can be done about this. A limited attempt can be done to punctuate the land with dips or elevation changes, but it still lacks as an effective representation of gradually sloped terrain.
Coupling these terrain attempts with 2x cube can result in some better results, but may be brick heavy. A simple brick conservation technique for cubes is outlined in the next section.
Ideally, hills should have gradually smoothed slopes at their top and bottom that border a medium-high angle in between. However, due to the fact that cubes have fixed heights, gradual sloping is rather difficult.
However, with some design considerations, you can get past this problem for the larger hills. The basic idea is to gradually decrease the distance between the old and new levels, increasing the "angle" the cubescape is creating gradually.
A problem with this method is that done over large areas, the cubes, and brickcount, can really add up.
An easy way to resolve this problem (if the whole section is consistent in height) is to use a method I call cube-baseplate alignment, as shown. It's just using normal blocks, coupled with a large baseplate, to cover a large area at the same height as the cube level you're trying to cover a large area with.
If used to support a 64x64 baseplate, it can save over 250 bricks. Don't forget to align the baseplate to the cube grid; it can cause problems later. The support alignment shouldn't matter, unless you're planning to add tunnels underneath.
Steep Terrain for grid-aligned cubescaping is difficult to pull off nicely, to say the least. The requirement to fit within the cube grid makes having terraced walls and 1-brick-wide ledges impossible to do without a combination of terrain styles. Usually people end up with flat walls of a sort, but most end up ugly.
The only way I've found to combat this problem is to make the cliffs very tall before terracing them in, and including a large vertical gap and jagged terrace edge.
Plating is quite nice when used with this, but isn't necessary.
Plating is simply the process of placing plates on top of basic cubescape. This can also be used for Uneven Cubescaping, but it's much more brick intensive and laborious.
There are two methods to do plating, one which is very brick intensive, but easy to do, and the other a more time-consuming method, but lower in brickcount and simpler in design.
Duplicated
The first method is simply building cubescape with a duplicated 4x4 cube that has a plate on top. However, there are some design considerations you should note.
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- Do you plan to place upper level cubes on top of the plating, or remove the plate when stacking cubes on top of each other?
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- Will you go back afterwards to reduce brickcount, or leave it? This can result in a doubling, if not more, of the brickcount of the cubescape itself.
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- Is the height consistency of the cubes essential to your build, or discardable?
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Manual
The color differences are to show the difference in bricks, not how you should color them.The second method is plating over the terrain once it is done, meaning that you can't auto-plate the terrain as you build. However, this saves brickcount significantly (if you don't like redoing the plating), and allows for easy cubescape adjustments when you need them. It also saves you the trouble of hammering every 4x4 plate you placed beforehand.
There really isn't that many differences between the two; its more of a work preference.
The main difference between uneven cubescaping and basic cubescaping is the conservation of the cube grid. In uneven cubescaping, we scrap almost the whole grid, keeping only the constant cube height difference between every level. This is highly integratable with brickscaping and is one of the best methods to do a cliff.
Butler's Filler Cubes is almost essential for this method, since running into alignment snags is almost inevitable. It also allows you to add another level of detail and achieve level outlines impossible to make with just cubes. Yes, you can use normal bricks and plates instead, but Filler cubes come out much more nicely and blend in better.
Since this style really only applies to Steep terrain, I'll skip over the Flat and Sloped types. I don't feel that using this style is necessary for either of those, but building uneven flat and sloped cubescapes with this style is simply just exiting Super Shift and working from there.
Simply put, cliffs using this style do not have to be completely flat vertically, and can have high slopes, overhangs, and less predictable shape. There are two different methods to do this.
Aligned
This style is named so due to the aligned cube structure, keeping the whole of the cliff section within a defined width. This is the easiest method, construction and design-wise, and can be duplicated en-masse.
Here are more example pictures of where/how it can be used.
Using the Filler Cubes, you can achieve a higher level of detail, adding some inconsistencies between layers, blurring the line and making the cubescape more realistic. Depending on the usage, it may or may not be more aesthetically pleasing.
Offset
Having the stacked cubes offset from the standard width of the lower cube allows you to create contiguous one-block ledges, and remove the flat boundaries caused by duplicating stacks of blocks. A snag that you'll run into is the issue of large gaps or overhanging blocks, when you're trying to do sharp terrain turns.
Filler Cubes are the only way to fix this problem, so be sure to have it enabled whenever you attempt this style.
They also break up the evenness of the cubes, if used correctly, and add a second level of detail to the terrain. It's a subtle difference, but is quite significant when used over large areas.
Smoothing out the top and bottom is more difficult than with standard cubescaping due to the unevenness. I advise combining this cliff style with
Brickscaping for good sloping.
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