Largest Atlas Terrain Possible at 1m Horizontal Scale?

[pmnestroh]

What is the largest terrain you can create in L3DT that can be converted into an Atlas Terrain at 1 meter horizontal scale for TGEA 1.8.2?

[lmaceleighton]

Well I think the biggest one I have managed is an 8192, but the times it takes to build is quite large, and the performance is good...well i wont get into the problems with atlas, but if you could only edit it in Torque after it would be perfect. I am thinking about adding Atlas into the new Torque 3D to use as mountains in the distance and edge/boundary shapes, and so I can have lattices that are terrain and not just object as I require good collision. How Big a terrain do you need? I have gotten 4 Blocks of the old terrain working well out of the box, lining them up is the tricky part, and sometimes you need to hide seems but it works well other than that.

[Aaron]

Hi pmnestroh,

There's no single answer to your question, I'm sorry to say. The size limitation with Atlas is determined by the 'atlasOldGenerateChunkFileFromRaw16' function in TGEA, which converts the RAW file exported from L3DT into the Atlas geometry. This function crashes if the triangle count exceeds a certain threshold. The triangle count depends on both the map size, and the geometric complexity/detail of the heightfield.

It is possible to generate 8192x8192 pixel Atlas files if the heightmap is very smooth. However, if the heightmap is highly detailed or noisy, the Atlas generator will fail unless you use smaller map sizes. For maps made in L3DT with the default settings, the level of detail is usually such that a 2048x2048 heightmap will be successfully converted by TGEA to an Atlas file.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[demi]

Atlas has limits as I found out. It is not resolution so much as number of triangles like Aaron mentioned. I finally went to an engine that just uses the mmf and can build 16 giga pixel maps.