[Need Advice] Landscape MOBA game

[Ko0zi]

Hello guys,

So I try to make this as brief as possible. I am trying to make a terrain for a MOBA style game, and have made a prototype in 3ds Max
I am a total newbie to the whole level design area so please try to explain " to a newbie"

Picture on the entire terrain here:



When imported to UDK it's about 33000 tris.
I need some advice regarding polygon levels, Collision solution and some good way for creating the material to it.
I know that there is a landscape feature in UDK that lets you to simply paint directly on the terrain and so forth but I heard that a static mesh landscape imported would have faster rending possibilites.
Should I use a static mesh for the landscape or do you think that I should make a heightmap from it and use the Landscape feature in UDK instead?

So if I use the static mesh, do you think that I can make the collision from the geometry itself without slowing the game down?

I'm very thankful for all the advice I can get. cheers

[Chicken+Ribs Combo]

You would probably be better off using the Landscape Tool. I've found that for landscapes that size (looks big anyway) the landscape tool will just bypass a lot of little niggling problems. The material setup and painting is less painful than doing it with a staticmesh, you wouldn't have to chop the landscape up into pieces as you would with a staticmesh and the landscape can be deformed as needed (you wouldn't have to go back into Max, alter the mesh, reimport it and hope everything worked out) You also wouldn't have to worry about LOD as Landscape will do it automatically. It's just a little less tedious to use the Landscape tool.

If you were to use a staticmesh landscape, you would not create a collision mesh for it. You would just set 'per-poly collision' in its properties which should be fine as the mesh doesn't seem too complex.

[Adrenen]

Indeed you should make heightmap out of it and import as landscape, you are gonna have collision , LODs and auto normals on your landscape and also easier to paint it with landscape tool. For landscape import use .raw images

[Ko0zi]

Okey yeah I took your advice, and it went out very nice. thanks guys