CryEngine 2 & Sandbox 2 Editor Tutorials

The world around us is simply not perfect, everything is not neatly laid out, clean, and organized wonderfully. If it was, it wouldn’t be any fun! Continually, people try to make maps that are perfect - this just kills the realism and can really hurt a map. With the vast features of CryEngine 2 you can make your creations more real.

In one article I can’t just write "do this to make your world imperfect" as there are millions of subtle things level designers do to make their worlds seem believable. Here is a quick summary of things you can do though:

Interior

• Magazines, books, food, and electronics. Homes, huts, and similar interiors would just look alien if they didn’t have these things in them. Don’t line them up in neat rows on a shelf. Realistically there map be a magazine or two scattered on the desk, some electronics in the corner, an apple on the table - maybe look in your kitchen for some inspiration.
• Rotated furniture. Look in to any room in your house: Are all your tables and chairs aligned parallel with the walls? Sitting in a perfect rectangle? If they are you’re obsessive compulsive, but for most people the answer will be no. When placing tables and chairs in a room, don’t try to make them perfectly aligned, give them some angle!

Exterior

• Varying Vegetation Size. Luckily when painting vegetation in Sandbox 2 it’s easy to make vegetation vary in size, which definitely helps with making your level seem more realistic. There is no hard rule on how much vegetation should vary in size, so just mess around until you’ve got a look you deem to seem real.
• Layers. Forests and jungles both have many layers. There’s the dirt, then grass, then rocks/pebbles, then leaves, then bigger rocks, then small vegetation, then bigger vegetation etc etc. Continually build up layers to make your map more dynamic. We’re not in the days of Super Mario 64, we can use more than flat color now!
• Rivers, Lakes, and Ponds. It’s all well and easy to make a river that is just one straight line, but to create something realistic you need to make it more dynamic. Use rocks, the terrain editor, and vegetation to make any water features much more imperfect. The Nile isn’t one highway-style streak of water, so why should your river be?

This was a fairly short article, but it was just an introduction to ways to make your level imperfectly perfect….I may create more parts to it in the future.