L3DT Users' Community

Hey, I've been messing around ith L3DT on my own but with no luck.

I'm creating a first person shooter, and I was recommended to use L3DT, and it certainly is impressive. However, whenever I try to create a heightmap and texture map, and render it, it looks horribly blurry and not detailed at the first person level, only when you zoom out do it look impressive.

Is there something I'm doing wrong here that I should be doing? I'm a programmer and not a artist, so I don't have alot of experience.

Hi AdamskiAirsoft,

Sorry for the slow reply, I was kind of hoping some FPS developers/modders in the community might chime-in on this before me.

Anyhow, for a FPS I would recommend that when you generate your map, you set the 'horiz. scale' to around 1m. The default is 10m, which makes the terrain look too smooth at the FPS-level as you observed. The terrain-generator is also not terribly-well optimised for this scaling-regime, so you may need to do some tweaking to get it right.

To get a detailed-looking texture-map I recommend you use both high-resolution light-mapping and texture-mapping (4x is a minimum). This requires the professional version of L3DT. If you don’t have a license, you can register for a trial-version via the instructions on the downloads page.

Here’s what I came up with after a few minutes playing with a 1024x1024 heightfield (0.5m/pixel), and a 4096x4096 texture:



The camera height was 2m above the terrain and un-zoomed, so this is a reasonable FPS-shot. The textures still look a little bit blurry, but you could easily do better with a higher-res texture (eg. 16x), by texture-splatting, or by using a good high-res detail-map overlay.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Ah, I would have nabbed it had I seen it earlier.

Aaron, is right that you'll want to represent a smaller area of terrain with a higher resolution heightmap. If you're referring to the actual textures used at the closest level, you'll need to employ some sort of realtime solution to get more advanced effects such as: splatting, clipmapping, detail mapping, normal/parallax mapping, etc etc...

Since you can't use L3DTVis for a FPS you'd need to implement your own real-time solution regardless, so this shouldn't be news to you.

As for the high detail quality of huge texture maps, while they are currently quite good, Aaron is only now trying to take it to the next level of quality at the closest level (also known as MegaTexturing).

I'd recommend some experimentation, research, and patience with the project (although at the rate and quality that Aaron works, I'd doubt that you'd need the last).