I decided I would make my life way easier and just use the terrain system rather then hassle with modeling out the whole map including lods, I will smooth out the terrain by hand so don't worry about that. The height map is 8192 by 8192 with a square size of 1.7 meaning the physical size of the terrain is 13926.4 by 13926.4, I will post updates more frequently now since it won't be as draining and time consuming to work on this.
I decided that I am going to leave pine hills and its current state and just make this version a separate map since it completely changes the layout and is basically a different map. Anyways here's a like sneak peak of some roads I'm working on.
Finally figured out how to use height from my roads and other objects later on and just add them on top of the heightmap. I was previously using shrinkwrap and subsurf modifiers but I was losing quality with that method. This isn't a dev tier heightmap exporter with all the fancy stuff yet but now that I have a basic grasp on composition I can start figuring out all the other stuff.
Taking a break from terrain and working on assets, I am not sure if I like this more than what I currently have but it does have half as many polys.
Might be a bit early to be deciding what the thumbnail for the map is going to be but this looks pretty good.
Quick update: Progress on the map has been slow and is going to continue to be slow while I begin to learn c# and move on to developing my own games in unity, I plan on eventually finishing the map but right now I'm more interested in unity.
Good work! I'm excited! --- Post updated --- Also, you might want to try adding some saplings and small bushes, as well as some boulders.
That sounds good too, having only this one limited time, if you have possibility to learn something like that it certainly can give back quite a bit. I have been practicing a bit of Unity too, amount of information and tutorials is insane, super easy to get going with it and if your brain can keep up doing single thing for long time, that certainly is great path. My brain can't really cope with single tasks for too long, so all my games are super simple not release worthy. I recommend that you craft out a plan for whatever you want to build or learn, also I wish you much of luck and success!
I was gonna upload these yesterday but the upload speeds on the website have been really slow as of late, but here is a custom skybox I rendered in blender and the reworked trees with some shrubs.
Almost finished refining my modular building kit, once I finish trying out a few other possible layouts I will export everything to beamng and start setting up some prefabs.
