L3DT Users' Community

Hi Piratelord,

piratelord wrote:One thing I've noticed in all my tests, is that the texture map that L3DT produces doesn't blend together neighbouring textures. So for example, you'll get a clear border line between two different textures, and if something is "sprinkled" among another texture, then it's just sharp pixels. Is this right, or am I missing some advanced features?

You're pretty-much right on that. At the moment, if you generate textures at 1:1 resolution, a resolution smaller than or equal to the attributes map res, or using the 'per pixel land types' option, there will be no blending between textures of different land types. However, if you use high-res textures with a lower-res attributes map and have per-pixel land types disabled, you will get some blending, but it ain't very pretty.

What I'll be doing in a future release (probably v2.5a) is add a Gaussian weighting function that blends in some of the texture of neighbouring land types. At the least, each land type will have a blend radius, but I may get a bit fancier and add blending groups so you can make grass->grass transitions smooth but grass->cliff transitions sharp. I don't have an ETA just yet, but I'm definitely thinking about it.

Cheers,
Aaron.

That would be nice. Not a major issue since we may be regenerating the textures again with some fine tuning, but it can be noticable in some areas, depending on the texture.

Just for interest, having replaced the textures L3DT uses with different ones, and expanding out the textures so that Dry Grass uses a different texture from Dry Grass 2 (for example), here's some pics.
Yes, I know the close up texture is poor, but we are trying to balance extreme filesizes in atlas with quality. Due to the size of our game world, to get excellent quality, the landscape would be about 29gig.....

Anyway, here's the pics. L3DT does an amazing job at calculating the textures. Great work there Aaron.

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... ewTex1.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... ewTex2.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... ewTex3.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... ewTex4.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... ewTex5.jpg

This is a good thread. We're using a large map for our TSE terrain, and are struggling to get good results. Mainly our issues come from "line spamming" (as I call it) in the texture. Basically, there are tons and tons of square-ish lines all over our texture. It looks like someone played Tetris on our terrain.

We have an 8kx8k height field right now, and we're importing it into TSE with a square size of 4, for a final game terrain size of 32k x 32k. Four our game's needs, the terrain must be this large (MMORPG). I would also like to remove L3DT from shadowing the terrain as much as possible and leave that to TSE's dynamic lighting. What should my map parameters be?

Would I still get good results by importing the map as 4k x 4k? My square size would then need to increase to 8.

Sounds like you are doing something like us, but we are splitting the terrain up into seperate tiles to make it easier to work with.
We have a 24km x 32km landscape and a 16834 x 12288 heightmap.
This gives us twice the amount of detail then you.
Combined with the now working detail maps and different textures, our terrain now looks like the following:

http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... x/2048.jpg
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... Grass2.jpg

Those are some sweet screenshots. Are you using fxFoliageReplicator for your grass? What parameters did you use for L3DT texture generation? Or are you using a Blender terrain?

yes, we are using the foliagereplicator, but working on getting an improved version. We are after dense realstic grass which the normal foliagrereplicator can't do too well.


I used the Temperate (Coastal) template, but adding in a load more defintions to smooth out the transitions between textures.
Finally, I loaded up the the textures in photoshop, and changed the mountain areas to be totally barren by overlaying a different texture on everywhere over 350 meters. Easier to do that then tweak all the texture defintions.
Out of our entire gameworld, this island is a bit more unique.


I believe I just done every option at 2x, since anything else wouldn't make any major difference. One important thing is to adjust the source textures to match your desired landscape.
No offense to Aaron, L3DT's defaults are great, but were a bit bland.

If interested, I can upload the climate file and textures (we are updating the textures further at the moment). The climate file has been tweaked speficially for our world, which might not be suitable for other people.

Thanks for the offer (appreciate it) but our game has a Desert climate so the textures would really be applicable. If you're interested in improving the grass in TGEA you should check the TGEA > Engine forum. There's a recent post there about that very topic.

Just 2x resolution? Interesting. We're using a square size of 4 for our terrain, so I was thinking of using at least that for the texture.

Our square size is 2, so for you to get the same "quality" as us, you would have to do 4. It doesn't look too bad with the detail terrain.

Ideally you'd want to go larger, but by my calculations, that size terrain give us a world space of 29gig. A little excessive!

Trouble is that virtually all of the atlas file is made up of bloated texture information. Our CHU file could be about 3 meg, and the TQT file around 47meg!

Crazy!

TQT file? You're still using an Atlas1 instance then? Is there a specific reason you haven't switched to Atlas2 terriain (texture and mesh get embedded into 1 .atlas file)?

Yes I know the file size is massive. Right now, at 1:1 resolution (8192) our terrain is 118MB.

Oh, sorry, we are using atlas2, I just couldn't remember what it calls the texture file it produces, and TQT came to mind, which was atlas1

Since your environment is desert, you should be able to get away with the lower quality texture, since the detail map will provide suitable detail for you.

118meg? Nice. That's about the same as two of our tiles which is just a small fraction of the whole world.

Hi Piratelord,

piratelord wrote:No offense to Aaron, L3DT's defaults are great, but were a bit bland.

No offence taken. Bland was my intention.

piratelord wrote:If interested, I can upload the climate file and textures (we are updating the textures further at the moment). The climate file has been tweaked specifically for our world, which might not be suitable for other people.

That sounds most interesting. Would you like to try uploading to the climate repository? If so, you can edit wiki-pages yourself, or else e-mail me a zip of the files, I'll upload it and do all the editing/linking. I still have to write a guide on how to use the climate repo.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Yeah, I could do, but I'll have to include a massive warning, since it replaces your temperate coastal climate and all the textures. Might cause some problems for some people.

One texture might not be suitable though for many people, since I've replaced grass1 texture with a more brown/green colour since we are using the foliagereplicator to cover the landscape, so we need something more like dirt then grass. But, it's easy to change the images.


Just personal preference, but I'd rather email it to you, along with some screenies.

Hi Piratelord,

E-mail is great. I'll also check over it to make sure it doesn't interfere with existing climates.

Cheers,
Aaron.