Extremely Simple Terrain Making Step By Step Guide For People Without Prior Knoweldge!

A quick simple solution for forming basic ground and area's for whatever things you may need it for!
Note that it does not go in-depth on textures or detailing, just the basics of forming the ground itself for beginners just wanting to lay down some work without any prior skills or knowledge!

Basics of Blender and Adding a Plane!

When you initially start up blender, you'll first come across this screen!
Click and Drag to select multiple things and press "Delete" to remove them, send the starting box to the shadow realm! (:<



Then you can click on the top tool bar on "Add" then hover the mouse over "Mesh" and click on "Plane" to add a flat panel to your Scene!



You can press "S" once the panel you added is selected (Or whatever hotkey you have for the "Scaling" option) and press numbers after it to scale the plane to that size! If you type in 20 and press "Enter" then it will be 20x bigger! (Though its not particularly needed since you can always scale it up or down later, I just prefer doing it at the start!)

Plane Subdividing and Statistics!

Once you scaled up your plane to whatever size you'd like, then you can change the mode on the top left of the screen from "Object Mode" to "Edit Mode"!

Edit mode will allow you to actually edit the plane and change its shape!
Then once you're in Edit mode and you have the whole thing selected, you can right click almost where on the main screen to bring up a menu and click on "Subdivide"!



The more you subdivide the more detailing you have.. Which is why I subdivide about 6 times since I usually don't need more than that for my projects and there are ways with texturing/shading that allow you to have details with lower polygon objects!
But depending on how big of the terrain you are making you may want to do it more times, but keep in mind it exponentially gets more taxing on your hardware to run and can become very un-optimized very quickly..

Which is why you should always count your vertices and faces! Which you can do (If its not already on by default) by clicking on the top right of the toolbar, and selecting "Statistics"! It is very important to make sure you don't have the polygons get out of hand! (:



Also, this kind of map making (in my opinion) only particularly good for smaller maps less than at most 3km big.. Its easy to make something too detailed to use and I highly recommend learning optimization tricks if you do go bigger! (:

Editing the Plane!

Once you subdivided to your hearts content, you can begin actually editing the flat panel into whatever shape you like!

For instance, you can press "W" to change your selection type to a variety of different options! I like using the AOE selection brush and then go around the edge and shape it into whatever I like!



then once selected I can either delete the faces OR press "E" to extrude them Up or Down and create a nice lil map inside a canyon or a cliff side!



Although as you can see the walls are very blocky! If I kept it a flat panel without creating walls by "Extruding" then it would be a lot easier since I'll have to spend time smoothing them out a bit. For instance making an island or a world map or something in the wide open wouldn't have this problem but its always nice having options and ideas when designing (:

Forming the Terrain!

Well, whether you decide to extrude or not is all up to you but the main purpose of this guide is to use the subdivided plane and the sculpting brush to manually change the elevation of the terrain to whatever you want!

Change to "Sculpt Mode" on the top left toolbar and once you do then go to the top and click the "Brush" settings to change the Axis' that are affected! If you want the brush to alter the terrain in all directions then by all means leave it default, but if you solely want to raise it up without it drifting left/right then change it to the "Z Plane" like in this screenshot:



Once you do, begin altering the terrain in any way, shape, or form you desire!!
I spent a few minutes to form the ground with branching into many different pathways but there are many MANY things you can do with this (:

[[SCULPTING TOOLS]]
"Draw" was used primarily for altering height. If you want to lower the height then hold "Left Control" to reduce it!
"Smooth" was used to smooth over the blocky edges
"Flatten" is primarily used to make pathways and spots for buildings..
And experiment with the other tools and see what else you can come up with! Enjoy yourselves!
(Also don't forget each brush has its own settings that affect it in a variety of ways)
"Left Control + Z" to undo (Or whatever you bound it to)
"Left Control + Left Shift + Z) to Redo
If you have any other questions then feel free to ask, I will try to respond as soon as possible! But also keep in mind that sometimes a quick google search might be faster (:



And that's it, you're done! Be sure to save as a .blend and export to whatever file type you desire!
I hope you enjoyed my process and leave a comment telling me what you think about it!

There's also another way where you draw out an area with vertices or already have an area space cleared out, then add the panel as a separate object and size it to encompass the whole area and cut away the remaining material as needed before attaching it and shaping it to your hearts desire!
That is also helpful in certain situations as well and just wanted to throw that idea out there for you (:

[nyannokonekko]

I don't use the displace modifier for terrain since I often use it this way to sculpt certain terrain features you wouldn't normally be able to use with displacement.. But I might made another guide for it some time in the future.

[audiovisualcringe]

This looks very good, do you think you could explain how you can also make uneven ground with the displace modifier? I think if you're not going for any specific detail (no particular hills, mounds, etc.) in your terrain, using the displace modifier would make building backgrounds/setpieces easier.

[Teeheehee14]

:D thank you!

[nyannokonekko]

@Teeheehee14
I'm glad you like it!
Also I adore your profile picture

[Teeheehee14]

thank you alot nyannokonekko! this will help me a ton on my blender 3d modeling journey