Issues creating terrain with HF import VS Torque 3D

[thevisad]

I have been reading the book the Game Programmers Guide to Torque, it's a little outdated but has a lot of good information about the engine. I was following through the tutorial in the book to create a game and the first step that it has you do is import a HF and create a terrain.

In T3D I import the png file with 1 Meter per Pixel, Height scale of 256 and it creates an appropriate level for me to adjust. Note this is after I have built most of the game and added in a lot of the level aspects.

In L3DT, when attempting to import the HF I can see the appropriately made HF, but any attempt to make a design field from the HF or proceed through the creation of design field -> HF results in either a flat or slightly bumpy terrain. If I modify some of the DM-HF options I can get a bigger mound, but then the terrain is incredibly complex and takes a long time to build. In T3D it takes about 1 second to create the terrain above. The HF png file is below, can anyone give me a pointer to what I am missing? Any help would be appreciated.

V

[lmaceleighton]

I am having trouble with what you question is. I am the one to ask about T3D terrain as I spend a TON of time with it. You scale sound right when bring a heightmap into T3D, but are you bringing it back into L3DT? Why not just edit it in T3D, there are good terrain editing tools... are you trying to make a volcano? i just need to know what you final goal is with the terrain

[thevisad]

I am having trouble with what you question is. I am the one to ask about T3D terrain as I spend a TON of time with it. You scale sound right when bring a heightmap into T3D, but are you bringing it back into L3DT? Why not just edit it in T3D, there are good terrain editing tools... are you trying to make a volcano? i just need to know what you final goal is with the terrain

The two pictures are of the import via each engine. The T3D picture is using the T3D import HF option. The Sapphire picture was taken after importing the same file into L3DT and creating the design map from the HF. There is a major discrepancy between the two terrains using the same HF file. What am I doing wrong during the import heightfield option and then subsequent terrain generation that it is producing such a radically different size terrain? I am just using the defaults with most of the options.

[Aaron]

Hi Thevisad,

I apologise for my slow reply; I've been a bit busy of late.

It looks like you need to set the horizontal and/or the vertical scale for the terrain in L3DT, just like you did when you imported the same image into T3D. In the import wizard, set the horizontal scale to 1 (meaning metres per vertex), and leave the vertical range settings as-is (these will default to 0->255 for this map file, which is what you set in T3D). When this is done, and after some preliminary texturing, this is what it looks like in L3DT:



You can easily enter these settings yourself, but an even easier option is just to use the TER importer to directly load the Torque terrain file, scalings and all. The menu option is 'File->Import->Import torque TER'. If there are any problems using the importer, please send the offending TER file to aaron@bundysoft.com so that I may investigate the problems.

Best regards,
Aaron.