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Large 3D terrain generator

WOW

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WOW

Postby bigkahuna » Wed May 24, 2006 6:22 pm

I'm brand new to L3DT, just downloaded the 2.4 beta 2, ran the walkthrough tutorial (nicely done) and all I can say is "WOW". I love it. I sent my email in for the Pro demo and my PayPal account has $25 set aside to buy it when it's ready... ;)

I'm a "serious games" developer and have a project or two I might be able to use L3DT with. What I want to be able to do is either take DEM terrain info or create a high res terrain by hand, and bring it into my game engine(s). Unfortunately, I'm not using Torque so I'm going to have to figure out how to get these terrains into the engines I am using.

One question for now: Can I export a color bitmap of the texturemap (with lightmap)? The engines I'm using don't support mosaic maps.

Thanks,

Paul
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Postby Joshua » Wed May 24, 2006 7:12 pm

Whether or not you're using Torque isn't a problem at all. Mosiac maps are optional up to a certain size, so if your engine does not support them simply don't use them.

You can export the diffuse textures with or without lightmapped information baked in, into several file formats, so you shouldn't have a problem finding one you can get into your engine.
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Postby bigkahuna » Wed May 24, 2006 7:24 pm

Thanks for the reply Joshua. I'm having a hard time finding where/how to export a single diffuse map (with or without lightmap). I'll dig around a bit more, but any hints in the mean time? Thanks!
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Postby Joshua » Wed May 24, 2006 7:43 pm

Well first you need to actually generate the maps, but after that just do:

View => Show Map => Texture Map

File => Export => Active Map

And set the settings to bitmap.
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Postby bigkahuna » Wed May 24, 2006 7:59 pm

Yeah, I think the problem is that the interactive tutorial set up the terrain to render to a 4x4 mosaic. There must be some way to just change this to a single texture map, I haven't found it yet.

In the mean time, I took the 16 images and assembled them in Photoshop. For some reason (?) several of the tiles seemed smaller than 512x512... huh...

I'll keep playing with it. Looks very interesting...
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Postby Aaron » Thu May 25, 2006 2:23 am

Hi bigkahuna,

bigkahuna wrote:There must be some way to just change this to a single texture map, I haven't found it yet.


In the texture-mapping wizard, disable the 'use disk drive paging (mosaic map)' option.

Cheers,
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Postby bigkahuna » Thu May 25, 2006 2:44 am

Thanks Aaron, found it. I'm importing this into a sim I'm creating with DXstudio (http://www.dxstudio.com/) and it seems to work pretty well.

The only "small" complaint I have is that the water level in the texture map seems to not be -exactly- level. Might be the way DXstudio displays the terrain map, I'm not sure. At any rate, I found the thread that explained how to turn off the water tint, so now I'm set. Looks great!

Awesome app. Well worth $25.

By the way, besides Terragen, what other app will produce nice sky boxes (at 1024x1024)? The only thing I would need Terragen for is skyboxes and I'd rather spend less than a hundred bucks for it. And while I'm at it, does anyone know of any apps that will create "nighttime" skyboxes (stars, clouds, moon)? Thanks!
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Postby Aaron » Thu May 25, 2006 4:29 am

Hi bigkahuna,

bigkahuna wrote:The only "small" complaint I have is that the water level in the texture map seems to not be -exactly- level.


If you want to force a uniform 'water plane' over the map, use the 'Flood water plane' option in the water-flooding wizard, and disable the 'auto-flood lakes' and 'auto-flood seas' options.

bigkahuna wrote:By the way, besides Terragen, what other app will produce nice sky boxes (at 1024x1024)? The only thing I would need Terragen for is skyboxes and I'd rather spend less than a hundred bucks for it. And while I'm at it, does anyone know of any apps that will create "nighttime" skyboxes (stars, clouds, moon)? Thanks!


I think Bryce does this, but it's not cheap either ($100 for v5.5, $60 for v5). Maylock wrote a guide on making skyboxes in Bryce (see here).

Cheers,
Aaron.
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Postby bigkahuna » Thu May 25, 2006 5:12 am

aaron wrote:If you want to force a uniform 'water plane' over the map, use the 'Flood water plane' option in the water-flooding wizard, and disable the 'auto-flood lakes' and 'auto-flood seas' options.

Thanks Aaron, I saw that. No, I probably didn't explain myself very well. What I'm seeing is the blue waterline is "crooked". For example, it's higher on one side of an island than on the other. I'm guessing that it's probably a problem in my game engine.

I think Bryce does this, but it's not cheap either ($100 for v5.5, $60 for v5). Maylock wrote a guide on making skyboxes in Bryce (see here).Cheers, Aaron.

I've also got Carrara Pro 4, which has an atmosphere (and terrain) generation engine similar to Bryce. Skies and terrains are beautiful, only two problems though: for some reason Carrara leaves a "hole" in the sky at the zenith and camera controls prevent me from getting the settings correct for a skybox or panorama... argh.

I'm going to tinker with Terragen a bit more and see what I can whip up. Thanks for your help!
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