DeleD Community Edition

[elementrix]

How to create a simple dungeon/cave in DeleD - by elementrix

first create a cube that is as big as the blue grid lines (so the big squares, not the small one's that are changeable in size) (you can only see these bigger squares in the top, front and side view. not the perspective)
set the grid size to 4 (by clicking on "4" on your keyboard)

now you should have a cube like this:


now go to polygon mode and select a face of your cube, then extrude it as far as you want (but it's better if the end of your extrude ends on the blue grid lines)

it should look like this:


now if you want to split this piece, extrude it again and this time only one square of the blue grid.
then select both side's and extrude them. it will look like this:


do this same same a little more until you get some kind of dungeon paths.
here is how mine looks but ofcourse you can create much bigger and better:


ofcourse a dungeon can't do without rooms so let's create some, the first room's will be 2 square blue grid lines high so lit's create them:
first extrude only one small grid line like this:


go to vertex mode and select all the four vertex's from the part you extruded.
now you have them selected press scale in the "geometry commands" menu.
then go to the top view and move you mouse (while pressing the left mouse button) over the view (scale it as wide as you want, for me it are 3 blue grid squares)
this is how it should look like:


now select only the 2 upper vertex's of the part you just scaled, go to front view and make sure you have "move" selected. then move them as high as you want (for me 2 big square grid lines high)
it now looks like this:


now select again all the four vertices of the part you scaled and moved. go to top view and move the 4 vertices back so they are at the same line as the 4 other vertices they are connected to.
this is what i mean:


then go to polygon mode and select the big polygon at the other side of the previous screenshot.
then extrude it as far as you want, for me it are 3 big blue grid square's.
now you should have a big cube, create some more if you want at the other places. (this will be the bigger rooms of you dungeon)
but dungeon's also have lower rooms. so let's create them.
these rooms are alot easier then the big rooms. you just first extrude how wide you wan't you room,
it should look like this:(in this screen i already selected the part i am going to extrude to to give the room it's length)


now select the part as seen in the previous screen and extrude that so you will get a room like this one:


then create some more small rooms and big rooms and you will have the layout for your dungeon/cave (just looked at mine and saw it looked like some karate ninja )
mine:


now go to polygon mode, then go to selection at the top of your screen(for the users that use DeleD 1.70 or lower click on edit), and then click on "select all"
now you should see that all the face's turn red. go to the "geometry commands" menu and click on flip and then on ok.



then go back to the object mode and press smooth; catmull-clark; ok. and then it should look like this: (you can do it twice to make it even more smoothed)



now apply a texture to it (if you don't know how to apply texture's to an object take a look at this tutorial: http://www.delgine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2087 and scroll down.)
(i used the texture that you can also use, you can find it at: materials-floors-floor04)

how my dungeon now look's like:



as you can see the dungeon doesn't look good yet and when you go with the camera in it you probaply won't see where your paths are going etc.
so we are going to throw some light's in this scene. you can create lights by simply clicking on pointlight and then click in the top view where you want them.
the best place to place your lights are in each room and parts where more paths cross eachother. these are the settings i use for my pointlights:


i use these settings because torchlights (which are used normally in dungeons) don't have white light so that's the yellow color.
and i changed to curve a little because dungeons are ussually a dark place and now the light's won't cast that far. (you could also use the range for this but when you do that you will see a line where the light stops.)

now apply a lightmap by clicking: edit-generate lightmap-entire scene. wait a minute and voila here is a very simple dungeon:



Comments & Crits are welcome, and when you some grammar mistakes please reply and i will fix them.

hope this helps:D

[Nocturn]

Nice (simple) method to do dungeons, will definatley play around a bit
About the grammar mistakes: bleu c'est francais. blue is english.

[elementrix]

where did you find that mistake please post the sentence.

[Nocturn]

[elementrix]

Fixed! and thanks

[jwatte]

Tesselation to turn boxes into tunnels -- clever!

I wish we had hierarchy in DeleD, though, so I could make a Torch prefab with the light built in, which I could then place wherever I wanted a light.

When doing this same thing in an editor like 3ds Max, you can add a bit of "feel" to the tunnels by using the "noise" modifier. I don't think DeleD has that -- at least not yet.

[fik]

elementrix - Very nice straight forward tutorial makes good use of subdivision.
jwatte - Stange you should mention that i am someway through creating a plugin just to do that.

[jwatte]

fik -- excellent! It'd be great if it had an option to affect vertices based on whether their normals point up, down, or sideways (weight the noise function with a dot product with an up or down vector).

[Maverick77]

nice tutorial, i'll play around with this when I start working on caves

[Jeroen]

Very nice work, elementrix. Easy to use and nice results! Can't wait to see what others will create using this method.

[rogue72]

smooth only a avilable on the pro ?

[Mr.Fletcher]

The Doo-Sabin smoothing algorithm for objects is also available for LITE, but the other algorithm and smoothing of sub-selection like polygons or vertices is only in PRO.
_________________
Behold! The DeleD Wiki! Please help us expanding it
DeleD on IRC

[Tincho]

[Il Buzzo]

Hi guys,
looking at this cave I just figured out that a torchlight shader will do the difference in level visualization....
I'll try with my level preview...
Anyway nice tutorial

[Donkey]

Hey. great tut tho, but you didnt said "smooth->catmull-clark" function was for Pro-only.
However great tut and i did learned something else: the Flip functions.