Freeworld3D Problem

[dennis]

I'm having a problem importing L3DT heightfields into Freeworld3D. After importing a heightfield from L3DT there are holes in the terrain. You can see the terrain here: http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e216/ ... 3DMesh.jpg.

Even with the holes if you export the terrain and then reimport it into L3DT it looks fine with the correct contours, heights etc. Here is what I did to import the terrain:

1. export from L3DT at 513 x 513 heightfield using the raw format. This is a single tile from a tiled HM. To get the height range to calculate scale I imported this single tile into L3DT.
2. Create a new 512 x 512 terrain in FreeWorld3D.
3. Import the heightfield as raw16. Scale is heightrange/65536. Units per step is the Horizontal Scale in L3DT.

Worked before but not now.

[Aaron]

Hi Dennis,

Most curious. Does the file load/display OK in Photoshop/Terragen/etc? The regular patchwork holes makes me suspect this is a problem in FreeWorld3D's terrain LOD algorithm or renderer (which are often tile-based), but I can't say I know how you might go about un-breaking it. Perhaps if you try a smoother map with less erosion? Complex surfaces can overload some LOD algorithms (this happens with Atlas at the moment), so making a less complex map may work.

Best regards,
Aaron.

[dennis]

I haven't tried either of those. However since it displays ok after being reimported to L3DT I think you are right that the problem is with Freeworld3D.

Very interesting point about overloading the LOD algorithm. I'll try some fairly uniform terrain without the highly eroded areas.

Thanks Aaron.

[dennis]

Well, it wasn't a problem with overloading the LOD algorithm. The problem is that Freeworld3D appears to require integer "Units per Step". This is the horizontal scale in L3DT. To get around the problem use "1" as the UPS and calculate vertical scale as height_range/(65536 * horizontal scale).