Before you look at this, i urge you to check out
Conan's fantastic terraining guide, as it definitely covers much more stuff than mine will. This little tutorial is basically a look into how i like to do terraining, and gives some basic tips and tricks to making tutorial that looks nice quickly. I've been requested by some people to do one too, so here's my try...
One of the more confusing parts of doing terrain, i've learned, is that you have to balance formulaic building with natural chaos. One one hand, if you are too chaotic in your building, you lose form, and your terrains not only take up more bricks than usual but end up looking a mess. However, even more prevelent, if you are too formulaic in terraining, your terrain ends up looking un natural and very.. well, plastic. Often times, terrain uses too little bricks, and too little colors, and ends up looking too geometric. The bottom line is
Nature is organized chaosif you look at a forest, it is not one thing. A forest is teeming with leaves and foliage, and trees. It wasn't planned by a city planner(unless it'sa park in new england or something), nature strives towards being random. However, at the same time, there is a certain order in nature. There isn't palm trees growing next to willows, it's eucalyptus and poison ivy. There are certain types of foliage growing next to certain types of trees and certain types of animals, and they create recognizable biomes, ones that by utilising this knowledge can be emulated.
Now, off with my spheal, today i'm going to be building a rocky hill terrain. This is basically my favorite type of terrain to do- it's easy, and looks pretty good if you do it right.
I'm going to be using
Jirue's faded colorset for this build. It's very nice for making terrain, and although it doesn't have as much variety as say, a specialized terraining colorset, it has good colors for making nice foliage and castles, or whatever you like.
These are the bricks that i use for this build, excluding the baseplate
I start off with the base. often times, it's a good idea to color your base the color of your foliage, just to see how your rock color clashes with it early on
now here's the important part: the base
Making the base is very important because the form of your base dictates the form of your terrain. It's good to stick to one single brick for outlining your base- in this case i chose the 2x2- because you can add in other bricks afterwards, like so;
Now, i continue on, building the entirety of the base
and the smoothing it out and filling in the gaps
Here's the important part. Being too formulaic is what can ruin your terrain, and in order to escape that, you have to Build with Entropy- basically, you have to stop
thinking so much. This is a concept that's sort of hard to impart, but basically, you have to build forms basically, and quickly, and think in general shapes, not dwelling on it too much. Humans are pretty bad at being random, which is why you have to sorta let go. I order to give you an example, let's get into building up:
These are two ways you could begin layering your build, but if you notice, the method on the left is directly copying the bricks on the bottom, where as the method to the right is building on top of the old bricks but changing up the path- this was intentional. If you follow the exact same layout as your base, your entire build will end up looking too bland. The problem is, people are more inclined to follow patterns then deviate from them. When building terrain, you may find yourself unconciously following the exact same layout as your previous layer because it feels right. You have to sort of catch yourself when doing that, and purposefully deviate from the previous form.
anyways, here i place in some 1x1's in order to smooth out this layer
It's important to always smooth out your terrain, because if you don't it will end up looking very jagged. I outlined the 1x1's in red to make them easier to see.
I follow the layering through the entire build
And even though im purposely making this layer different then the previous one, by using similar bricks, it continues to maintain its shape throughout the entire build.
i then go through and smooth out the entire thing with 1x2's and removing the gaps
Just some more pics of the layering i do throughout:
Now that i've finished that layer, i move on to the final layer, but this time i change it up a bit
though it is a little difficult to change up the base drastically, while still using the same bricks, it is possible to make them look different. For this layer, i purposely place my bricks on the edges of the previous layer, leaving more room for smoothing out later and making it dip inwards a tad bit more.
a little bit of smoothing
And there's the third layer. Now it's on to the grass layer
When it comes to doing grass, i often stick to using plates, and when using this technique grass is a cakewalk. When i apply the base layer of grass, i always make sure i stick very inwards
(I changed the base color to make the green show up better)
And then, for the top, i plant down a 16x16.
After doing so, i also went over the entire layer and added in 2x2's and such in order to cover up the holes and straighten out the entire top layer, so it doesn't look to blocky
And finally, i add in some 1x1's to smooth it out
You'll notice that most of the rocks aren't covered up, and here's the fun part- since you've already made your base, you can really just apply the grass onto it without too much difficulty
And then you can begin to start applying this grass layer to the entire build
At this point, the rest of the build can be dedicated to adding in small details to make it look a tad bit more dynamic
I add some coloring on the base, and a couple of roses to the top.
And there you go! I've built a small little plateau, and it only took me about 10 minutes to do it. I'll be honest, it's not the best terrain i've ever built- i could have certainly used plated to smooth out the base layers, and made the grass a tad bit more volumetric, but this little build basically encompasses the whole technique that i used to build the terrain on my Ancient Temple, and such.
I know that the whole entropy thing is hard to convey, but this is my first little foray into tutorials i've done, so please, any feedback is appreciated. Did i totally lose you? Was this terrible? Was it great? Fire away. Anyways, if you guys enjoyed this, i'm planning on doing some other ones for different types of terrain. Aight, peace!
