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Tiled mesh exporter

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Tiled mesh exporter

Postby Aaron » Wed Jun 22, 2011 12:54 pm

Hi Everyone,

Major improvements to L3DT's mesh file exporters have been included in the latest build (v2.9 build 25), such as:
  • Support for seamlessly tiled meshes.
  • Support for exporting selected areas as meshes, with matching texture tiles &c.
  • Support for exporting alpha maps and other map layers with the meshes (with tiling, if desired).
  • Bug-fixes for dodgy triangles and wonky face winding.
You can read all about it in this blog post. If you'd like to comment on these changes, please reply to this thread.

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Re: Tiled mesh exporter

Postby creat326 » Thu Sep 01, 2011 4:14 pm

Hi Aaron,

I'm going to give a try to this feature today or tomorrow. As I said previously I think a major thing stopping this from becoming a great feature is that it doesn't optimize the triangle count on the edges so in my case I'm still stuck using other software to do the optimization since otherwise most of the triangles are on the edges, making it look funny on the game.

I'm going to try making a terrain for the iphone/android and see how it goes.

btw, is there a way to get repeteable tiled terrains? (meaning, they connect on all sides with the other ones so you can attach them to infinity and look continious). I did that pretty often with world machine.
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Re: Tiled mesh exporter

Postby creat326 » Sat Sep 03, 2011 12:50 am

ok, i tried it and i can't use it on its current form. I'm still going back to 2 other tools to fix the issues. This is what I found:

1) Tiled jpg textures, for some reason are the size of the tile+2 pixels. So the 512x512 when exported as obj i get jpg that are 514x514, i don't know why.
2) The unoptimized borders is just too much. To give you an idea, I can load it up all meshlab (another program) and reduce the count by 95% for my game. But on l3dt since the borders are kept intact, literaly 90% of triangles are on the edges.
So I have a 4000 triangles tile with 3500 triangles on the edges... just to give an example, and everything in between is almost a flat area. While using meshlab I'm able to get the 4000 on the mountains and almost clean edges unless they are also mountains. You can see that they actually look nice with so little poly count on www.dogfightplay.com teaser video (i reduced the count using a combination of meshlab, world machine and then the textures generated with l3dt).
3) I still see the seams. I imported the tiles into Unity3d and I can clearly see the edges making it look unprofessional. This may be due to the 514x514 textures, not sure about this.

Having these 2 issues solved would save me full days of work, since I have to keep switching/importing/exporting among different programs to achieve this behaviour.
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Re: Tiled mesh exporter

Postby Aaron » Sat Sep 03, 2011 8:10 am

Hi Creat326,

Thanks for the feedback. Fully optimising the tile edges is still on the dev plan, and I will get to it when time permits.

I'll look into the texture tiling problem. It looks like I may have overshot by one pixel.

btw, is there a way to get repeteable tiled terrains?


Yes indeed. Check the 'Edge wrapping' checkbox in the heightfield size wizard when generating your heightmap.

Regards,
Aaron.
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Re: Tiled mesh exporter

Postby Aaron » Tue Sep 06, 2011 2:24 pm

Hi Creat326,

I had indeed overshot by one row/column of pixels in the texture tile cutter. I have included a fix in the latest developmental build (L3DT Pro 11.09 build 2), which is on the Pro downloads page now. Thank you for the bug report, and please let me know if you find any further problems.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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Re: Tiled mesh exporter

Postby creat326 » Tue Sep 06, 2011 7:09 pm

optimize the borders for triangle count and i'm bought :)
erm... well i bought long ago, i mean, double bought
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