Lesson 7: Preparing the Landscape

Next you will create a body of water by digging a hole and adding some water.

In this tutorial, we'll use a Negative Boolean operation to cut a hole out of the ground plane. A Negative Boolean operation requires a Positive object (or a Positive group of objects) and a Negative object. When these are grouped together the shape of the Negative object is cut out of the Positive object. Objects can be given Negative, Positive, Neutral or Intersect attributes in the Object Attributes box.

To set the landscape as a Positive Boolean object:

1. Click the Display modes button to switch to Wireframe mode.
2. Select one of the terrains.
3. Holding down Shift, select the second terrain and the ground plane. All three wireframes should now be highlighted in red.
4. Click the Object Attributes button (the A button), then enable the Positive option. This makes each one of the selected objects positive.
5. Click the OK icon.

To group the terrains:

6. Click the Group button (the G button in the vertical list associated with the selected objects). This will group the three objects (Terrain 1, Terrain 2, and Plane 1) together in a Group called Group 1.
7. With Group 1 still selected, click the Objects Attributes button.
8. Enable the Positive option.
9. Click the OK icon.

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