Terrain editor for HL2

Does a terrain editor likeGEN surf or something exist to make a good terrain in Hammer?

What's wrong with displacements?
Or are you trying to create very large terrain?

I know there is a program, I've seen screenshots of it being used for making HL2 maps, I just can't remember the name of it.
Sorry. At least you know for sure there is a program.

The Source version of Hammer has a nice tool that allows you to create realistic terrain easily and quickly. Its basically a paintbrush where you "paint" the height onto the terrain and you have various options for the paintbrush. Surfaces that you "paint" on are called displacements and are very cheap to render, in other words, they generally require less processing power to display than bsp geometry and models.

In Half-Life 1, if you wanted terrain like this, you would either have to do it by hand by making a series of triangles and editing each vertex with the vertex manipulator tool or use a program like Gen Surf which creates excess polygons and is generally pretty limiting.

---

Aaron's Stuff

Where is the tool? I think i never saw it in the lastest version of hammer (source one).

There is a tutorial in the Articles section here on Snarkpit.
You can find it through this link:
Displacement Surfaces 1: The Basics by ReNo

OK thanks

If you want more control over your terrain, there is an advanced third party tool by Nem simply called 'Terrain generator' that can save whatever you make into a .VMF file so you can open it in Hammer, and compile! (They will be displacements). You can read more about it and download it here.

---

Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

That looks like a pretty nifty program. I'd only use it for Unreal, though; it doesn't have the Half-Life look.