WORLD EDIT TUTORIAL: Basic Terraforming

Hello builders!

Today I’ve made a terrain tutorial using World Edit commands. In this tutorial, I’m going to make a path through hills. For the sake of focusing on the terrain and not what it’s made of, I’ll be making the terrain with generic stone.

Steps 1 - 3:

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Step 1: Empty land.


Step 2: Make base of terrain. This can be pretty much any shape you want. The purpose of this is to get blocks down we can shape later. For this tutorial, I’m going to make a big ellipsoid as a base.



Step 3: Lay out where the path is going. For this task, I usually use a brush and a block I know I’m not going to use later. In this case, I used lapis. The exact commands I used to make this path layout were /brush sphere 22 4 and /mask >1. More information about masks can be found in another tutorial, linked at the bottom of this post.

Step 4:

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Now that I know where the path is going, I can make the surrounding terrain. I start first by outlining the path with some stone spheres. These spheres will be the base of my hills. In this example, I used size 6 spheres. The bigger spheres the you use initially, the steeper/larger the hills.


Next, I do another round of outlining with larger spheres. These larger spheres will serve as the middle of the hills.


Same routine. Do one last outline, this time with small spheres to serve as the other side of the hills.


This is as many layers of spheres as I’m doing for this example, but feel free to experiment and find a look that works for you. There is no one correct way to terraform.

Step 5:

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Add some variation to your hills. Now that you have the basic shape, add some high points to the hills. Natural hills aren’t all the same height.

Before:

After:

Step 6:

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Smoothing. Remove the path layout we made in step 3 so this doesn’t get mixed up in the hills. Since I made this a block I knew we wouldn’t use later on, it’s easy enough to use //replace.


The goal of smoothing is to disguise the fact I used spheres for my terrain base. If I have smoothed successfully, it’ll look like normal terrain and not at all sphere-like.

To smooth out the hills, I’m going to use //brush smooth. The default parameters are 2 and 4. The first represents the size of the sphere for area to be affected. The second is the smoothness. The lower the number you enter, the more gentle the smooth. For the first pass of smoothing, I’m going to target where the hills meet the ground. I’ll be using //brush smooth 3 1.



Now that the sides of the hills are smoothed out, I’m going to do the middle parts.


Once I’ve gotten the hills suitably smoothed, I select the entire area and run //smooth 1 to put the finishing touch on it.


Again, there’s no perfect way to smooth. Do whatever until you’re happy with how it looks.

Finished product:

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Note:

• For those of you who are experienced with World Edit, this tutorial is probably nothing new to you. This tutorial is aimed at those who have used World Edit before, but don’t know all the ins and outs of its commands yet.
  
• To keep the length of this tutorial post manageable, I will discuss the basics of terrain detailing in another post.

I hope you found this helpful for future builds. If you have suggestions for tutorials I should do next, let me know!

Other Tutorials
WORLD EDIT TUTORIAL: Spikes
WORLD EDIT TUTORIAL: Big, big, big circles!
WORLD EDIT TUTORIAL: Masks