Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Figure 2-6 shows the creation of contour lines, and their final position with basic
“elevation” information included. You can see that they are now 3-D lines, if you
look at them from each of your views (Top, Side, Front, Perspective) on the screen.
Step Three: Build a Mesh from Your Contour Lines
If you were using an image file in your image plane background to draw your contour
lines, hide that now and create some basic geometry from the splines you’ve created
and adjusted. We just want to create a basic mesh that can be used to run a player
around on in order to check out level basics, like sizing and scaling issues and so forth.
Figure 2-7 shows a “loft” operation, a basic modeling move, to create a polygon
mesh from the contour lines. You can see that we now have a basic wireframe model
of our environment starting to take shape.
Step Four: Utilize File Referencing to Build Up and Populate
Your Level
Now you can begin to create prototype files, commonly called “file referencing,”
which will associate certain heavily reused pieces of geometry with a button, and al-
FIGURE 2-6
Create contour lines
C H A P T E R 2
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Level Planning and Building