I want one of these terrains in Torque

[Psycho]

This pic is from the Terragen terrains in Bundysoft's gallery. I assume it was created in L3DT and then imported into Terragen for render. I want my terrain to look this good. Can it be done so this terrain runs in Torque?

[Aaron]

Hi Psycho,

The heightfield was created in L3DT, and the texture was created procedurally in Terragen. It may be possible to have a terrain look that good in TGEA, but you would need a) some crazy displacement-mapping shaders in the engine, and b) an extremely high-res texture from L3DT (say, 32x).

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Madcowthomas]

Other problem you run into is that Terragen only goes up too 4096 in there map size.

[dennis]

It has been my experience that you run into a limit on texture size in TGEA. This is true for both unique and blended terrains. It stems from the best case situation of keeping the tree depth the same for the geometry (heightmap) and the textures (texture for unique, lightmap and opacity for blended). If your texture tree is deeper than the geometry you loose the highest levels of detail in the texture.

Texture Size = (2^(tree_depth-1))*(tile_size)

You can see this in action if you look at the TGEA console window after converting a tiled texture using atlasGenerateTextureTOCFromTiles. Although you don't specify a tree depth TGEA calculates it from the above relationship. For a geometry tree depth of 6 and a tile_size of 512 the maximum texture size is 16k x 16k. So for a 4k x 4k heightfield the highest practical resolution is 4x.

Although I haven't worked much with the large JPEG equivalent import function it appears to have similar limitations.

[Aaron]

Hi Dennis,

If I read that right, you can increase your max texture size for a fixed tree depth by increasing the tile size. Is this so? Can we just make textures with 1024x or 2048x texture tiles, and thereby get prettier results in Atlas?

Cheers,
Aaron.

[dennis]

Yes, this is possible. However you have to play with the clipmap size in TGEA or you get some pretty odd results. Mostly I have stayed with 512 x 512 textures.