Aah Kasseyus, I found your thread.
Yeah def have a look at the caves I have done, to give you some idea and direction.
Still these caves are hardly perfect, and the enclosed ones still is going to have collision problems unless you add a floor in there.Then still AI seem to move off the segment floor.It is a pity as the enclosed ones were really nice.
But the best approach is what I did in cave 3 and recommend you have a look at them as well.As it contains just the cave shell and then you paint the floors normally.
basically this is what I did with cave 3.
1. Create 300 x 300 cubes and align them in the shape of the caves you want.
2.Use a boo-lean operation and join all the cubes together.
3.Turn your view so that the bottom of the cave cube stands point up
4. Add egdes on the bottom, and position them pending how wide you want your caves. 50 units on each side would give you a cave 200 units wide, basically two segments wide.1 segment unit wide is pushing a bit for collision.You basically drawing a block with in a block.
5.Select all faces in between the edges, with a polygon tool.If your 3d editor allows for it, it should,
duplicate those faces you have selected and push those faces down to create your cave ceiling, 125 to 150 units looks good just above a normal segments in height
6.Delete all the outside faces except the bottom faces on either side of ceiling and walls you created. They are there for aligned in FPSC segment editor.
7.Bevel all vertical edges, move the 2 newly created point of both the ceiling and floor inwards a bit, units max
8. Deform your cave as you see fit.But stay with in the 300 X 300 area, also not too close to the bottom faces egdes as you will have alignment issues, bevel any newly created vertical corners.
9.Make sure all points are connected to one another, will allow for a smoother subdivide.
10. Save an additional copy of the cave somewhere, just in case some thing goes bad
11.Select all the inside faces except the two bottom faces, with a polygon tool and subdivide your cave 1 or 2 levels pending on how it looks, as smooth as possible with an eye on the poly count.
12.Fix up points in corners and where else needed.
13. Slice into 300 x 300 blocks, those bottom faces serves another purpose, as it gives you a guideline to slice by.Making sure all grid snapping,points and all those precise alignment tools are enabled, this will allow that each mesh is sliced perfectly.
What I normally do, I slice the cave into 4 or 5 parts, and duplicate the amount of times plus two spare ones I have to slice each part.So 23 blocks 23 duplicates, I have to do this, as my software deletes the section above the slice.
14.After slicing select the group of blocks and apply a uvmap it should allow the intersecting blocks uvmaps to be seamless.fix faces as needed.
15.Export to coordinates 0.0.0 and import into FPSC segment creator.Because of the mesh shape and having delete the unneeded faces moving the mesh around the editor will crash it.So by pass this by first importing a wall or cube first and placing it center in the editor, apply textures and settings, then replace the mesh with the first cave section and save as.
Without doing any thing else simply replace that mesh again with the second mesh and save as, do it with the 3rd and fourth and so and so, if the editor crashes you can simply import the first save cave file and replace the mesh again, each mesh will simply snap into the previous ones place if you followed the 300 x 300 and xyz coordinates.
oh just remember you can't save them as a room segment, so you will to use external segment and either over direct or overfull light mapping.
16.Your done your cave is complete, seamless, perfectly, aligned with least amount of trouble, now you can go work on those props.
This is hardly a tutorial, but just to give you some direction and to make things easier for your self
, Not that my method is easier
Would have liked to give you a sample map that means uploading a 60mb file.
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=196547&b=24
good luck I hope this helps you a lot, it is hard too explain some thing that is second nature to me
Just been chatting to my neighbours teenage daughter and it turns out she's big into UFOs and aliens.
Which is cool because tomorrow she's getting abducted.
