Terrains are fun; UV mapping is not

Just a quick update this morning. Last night I spent my time on two things: UV mapping and terrain painting.

For those of you who don't know, UV mapping is the process of "unwrapping" all the polygons in a 3D object onto a flat image so it can be painted with a texture. This process has gotten much easier in the last few years, thanks to some more sophisticated algorithms having been built into most of the 3D programs. Nevertheless, it is still very time consuming (and tedious).

After getting tired of trying to map UVs for one of my buildings, I decided to spend a little time creating a terrain. I have a fairly good idea how the terrain should be laid out for the opening area of the game world, so I started creating the rough, square shape of it. After about 10 seconds, I realized that making a terrain is considerably more entertaining than UV mapping. I then proceeded to spend so much time on it that I wasn't able to write a blog post.