ABSTRACT
To be a designer of virtual worlds and the landscapes they contain, you must understand the relationship between the terrain and your subjective point of view. Fundamentally, our virtual landscape experience is a duality. It comes from our actual position on the terrain (including the height of our eye level and the draw distance settings in the client viewer), as well as from our emotional/subjective reaction (point of view) to what we see. To develop your design vocabulary and make terrain that will create an emotional impact on the visitors to your virtual environments, you need to experience as many landscapes in the real world as possible and make your own personal notes about how they affect your emotions as your brain processes the visual, auditory, and tactile sensory input from them. At the risk of sounding like a travel brochure, see the massive scale of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, visit the sand dunes in Colorado or in the Sahara, or take a boat across the delta of the Mississippi or the Ganges River. Various high-level concepts regarding terrain design will be explored in the following sections of this chapter, including these key ideas:
• Inside-out or outside-in; understanding two approaches for designing • Individual and collaborative storytelling supported with landscape design • Usage of heightmaps, polygons, and voxels for landscape creation
At the end of this chapter, there is a project in which you will work with a 512 meter × 512 meter terrain heightmap. This landscape will serve as the foundation for the game-based sim environment developed throughout this book.
