Ok the noise deal is pissing me off

[Forboding Angel]

I have to render everything in 1 to 1 ratio because l3dt adds noise to 1 to 8 textures and it looks like crap and very blurry.

I need to know how to remove the noise. Can someone please help me?

Fricking blurry:


Not the best climate ever hacked up but at least it's not blurry:

[Aaron]

Hello,

Have you tried the 'per-pixel land types' option in the texture generation wizard? It's supposed to fix that problem.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Forboding Angel]

Well, that works, only problem is that it takes longer than just rendering in a 1 to 1 ratio.

Sorry for the title of the initial post. It was made after screwing around with it for 6 hours. I was rather frustrated.

Could not the noise just be removed completely?

Umm, also, another wierd thing... If you render the HM in 1 to 8 ratio, you get super thick walls and such, but if you render at 1 to 1 with a hoz scale of 4 (the best I can get without getting loads of contour lines) they are darn near non existent.

Edit (Aaron): Whoops, I screwed up your post accidentally (hit 'edit' instead of 'quote'). Sorry. I think it's back to how it was.

[Aaron]

Hello,

Well, that works, only problem is that it takes longer than just rendering in a 1 to 1 ratio.

Indeed, per-pixel land types is slow; it's a more complicated routine that gives you sharp textures for all texture resolutions. The regular routine gives you blurry/noisy textures for high texture resolutions, but is faster.

Sorry for the title of the initial post. It was made after screwing around with it for 6 hours. I was rather frustrated.

No need to apologise, but please feel free to ask questions before the 6-hour mark.

Could not the noise just be removed completely?

Yes it could, but then the texture would be really blurry. In fact, it wouldn't be much better than if you generate a low-res texture and resize it upwards.

Umm, also, another wierd thing... If you render the HM in 1 to 8 ratio, you get super thick walls and such, but if you render at 1 to 1 with a hoz scale of 4 (the best I can get without getting loads of contour lines) they are darn near non existent.

I'm not sure I follow. Could you give us some screenshots?

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Forboding Angel]

the above pictures are a perfect example

the one on the top is generated usingm 1 to 8 scale heightmap

the one on the bottom is 1 to 1 scale.

For example, if I want to make a texture map that is 8192 x 8192 I have 2 choices...

Import my heightmap at 8192 x 8192 and run it through the operations and end up with a really high detail map...

or,

import my heightmap at 1024 x 1024 run it through (very fast) and then create a texture at 8 scale producing an 8192 x 8192 texture.

Option is a serious butthole to do and takes a while (even tho I jsut do import, design map, att map and then generate the terrain).

The resulting map is very different. Look at the walls for a perfect example. 1 to 1 seems to be a whole hell of a lot more picky which is whyI generally set the horizontal scale at 4 so that I at least get some rock walls. Any smaller hoz scale results in horrible contour lines.

Also, generally the maps I render are done at 1 to 1 ratio with max alt 400 and min alt 100 (which is the settings I use in the game to achieve balanced gameplay). High walls and whatnot look really cool, but in Ta Spring those kind of maps play horribly and I'm not a huge fan of texture stretching, so I render at the same size as I use in the game.

I can post more picture examples if you like.

[Aaron]

Hi Forboding Angel,

Okay, I've had a bit of a thinker about this.

Firstly, I've tried these two approaches you mentioned (high-res HF with 1:1 texture, and low-res HF with 8x texture), and the latter is by far the better in terms of quality when 'per pixel land types' are used (though it is slower). If speed is a serious issue, you could try the half-way house of downsizing your heightmap to 2048 and using 4x textures. Using 2x or 1:1 just looks nasty in comparison.

As for the differences in wall-thickness, this is because at different map-sizes you need to use a different horizontal scaling so that the gradient remains the same. For example, if you down-size the HF to 1024x to generate an 8x texture, you have to make sure that the heightfield horizontal scaling is 8x larger too. Does this make sense?

Any smaller hoz scale results in horrible contour lines.

You're importing the heightmap from a 8-bit image, yes? What I recommend is to load the image in photoshop/paint.NET/whatever, convert to 16-bit mode (as a png), and run a very mild Gaussian filter over it. That should clean out the steps due to the 256 levels in the image file. I'll put it on my to-do list to add a filter option in L3DT (it does it already for some operations, but there's no user-interface).

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Forboding Angel]

Aaron, I disagree with 1 to 8 looking better

the texture does not tile as often the texture is in fact blown up horrendously (from what I've seen, and the smallest bump results in a rock wall, which is just irritating.

ehh, meh

[Forboding Angel]

umm I retract my previous statement

I think you may be my new hero. I will post before and after shots when I get this terrain finished.

[Forboding Angel]

oh FFS!!!

I rendered it 1 to 8, got a real nice mix of terrain types between grass steep grass and rock wall.

I do it at per pixel land types and get nothing but grass and rock wall. DAMNIT! Now I really am upset ><

Edit: Ok, l3dt has some really wierd oddities going on with the climates. I'm going to just go back to 1 to 1 ratio and try to fix my climates.

Unfortunately the documentation on the climates is rather shady. Aaron, would it be hard to make a small program that would calculate climates for us? As in, you set the texture and designate what slope alt etc. Hell I dunno how to explain it.

I like l3dt but it is an irritation to use a lot of the time. I don't really enjoy rendering terrain 10 times in a row. The other issue is getting it to look realistic in game.

Aww well

[Aaron]

Hello,

I rendered it 1 to 8, got a real nice mix of terrain types between grass steep grass and rock wall. I do it at per pixel land types and get nothing but grass and rock wall. DAMNIT! Now I really am upset ><

I'm sorry if L3DT's causing you frustration - if it's any consolation, I find the climate system bloody hard to use too (that's why there are only a handful of climates, and only one of them is any good).

Anyway, to continue my tradition of asking stupid questions - were the textures different for the grass and steep-grass land types? Are you using the 'temperate' climate, or a variation of it? If the latter, can you send it to me?

Edit: Ok, l3dt has some really weird oddities going on with the climates. I'm going to just go back to 1 to 1 ratio and try to fix my climates.

I'm not yet convinced the climate system in L3DT 2.3x is buggy, but it certainly is very hard to use. I'm currently building a user-interface for creating/editing climates in L3DT, which should help things somewhat.

Anyway, I do recommend optimising your climate on a small map before using it on a large map, as it will save you a lot of time. Climate development is currently very iterative; change one parameter, re-load the climate files, generate the attributes map, repeat until happy. Most of the L3DT climates were developed using 512x512 maps or smaller, and only then did I apply them to larger maps for any minor tweaking.

Unfortunately the documentation on the climates is rather shady.

Indeed. I never wrote a good guide to making climates because I knew I'd be implementing a climate editor sooner or later that would make the tutorial redundant. As much as I like writing docs, that seemed like too much wasted effort. Anyhoo, there is at least a good half of a tutorial on making climates in the wiki, which I'll revise and finish when the climate user-interface is ready.

Aaron, would it be hard to make a small program that would calculate climates for us? As in, you set the texture and designate what slope alt etc. Hell I dunno how to explain it.

That's the climate editor I'm talking about (though it's in L3DT, not an external app).

I like l3dt but it is an irritation to use a lot of the time.

Thankyou for your feedback, it will be passed on to my development team, and my customer-support team should get back to you shortly.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Forboding Angel]

ok, keep in mind I'm using these for ta spring mapping which is in 3d...

Also, to keep map file size down I only use 3 textures per climate

I'll link some screenies. Anyway, here is my climate file...

Code: Select all


L3DT Climate File 
#VersionNo:   1.0
#ClimateName:   "Green Test"
#ClimateRGB:   50, 255, 50

#ClimateGradCoeff:   1
#ClimateCurvCoeff:   1
#ClimateWaterCoeff:   1
#ClimateSalinCoeff:   1


#TypeID:   1
#TypeName:   "grass"
#TexName:   "grass/evergreen1c.jpg"
// #HiTexName:   "grass/evergreen1c.jpg"
// #HiTexBlend:   0.2
#ColourRGB:   175, 200, 90

#BaseProb:   0.80
#WaterCoeff:   0.25

/* steep lush grass is copy of lush grass with slightly lower prob + slightly higher grad */
#TypeID:   2
#TypeName:   "steep lush grass"
#TexName:   "grass\evergreen1h.jpg"
// #HiTexName:   "grass\evergreen1h.jpg"
// #HiTexBlend:   0.2
#ColourRGB:   150, 190, 80

#BaseProb:   0.785
#WaterCoeff:   0.27
#SalinCoeff:   -0.2
#GradCoeff:   0.08



/* rocky bits */

#TypeID:   3
#TypeName:   "rock slope"
#TexName:   "rock\rock3.jpg"
// #HiTexName:   "rock\rock3.jpg"
// #HiTexBlend:   0.2
#ColourRGB:   120, 120, 120

#BaseProb:   0.55
#GradCoeff:   0.75


#TypeID:   4
#TypeName:   "cliff face"
#TexName:   "rock\rock3.jpg"
// #HiTexName:   "rock\rock3.jpg"
// #HiTexBlend:   0.2
#ColourRGB:   80, 80, 80

#BaseProb:   0.40
#GradCoeff:   1


/* snow */

#TypeID:   5
#TypeName:   "snow"
#TexName:   "snow\snow1.jpg"
#ColourRGB:   255, 255, 255

#BaseProb:   0.90
#MinAlt2:   1300
#MinAlt1:   2000


#EOF



Contour lines are still messing with me real bad. Photoshop won't let me save the 16 bit files as anything other than psd, dds, tga. Quite annoying really.

Unlike your temperate climate, I do not need anything to look good in 2d, cause when it gets shading and goes 3d is what I care about.

[Aaron]

Hello,

Okay, I'm understanding this better.

I've tried it out, and indeed you get good coverage of land types. If 'grass' and 'steep lush grass' come out looking the same, then I guess it is because "evergreen1c.jpg" looks too similar to "evergreen1h.jpg".

Also, since you've commented out the high-res textures (#HiTexName), there's not much point using 8x textures; it won't do anything. I appreciate this is to keep the file size down, but the end result is that the textures will look 'splodgier', and the repeat-distance will be more noticeable. I guess that means back to 1:1 textures, and 'per pixel land types' disabled.

Contour lines are still messing with me real bad. Photoshop won't let me save the 16 bit files as anything other than psd, dds, tga. Quite annoying really.

Bugger, I see what you mean. I've just tried the GIMP and paint.net, and neither do 16-bit. I'll have to have a bit more of a thinker on the easiest way to kill those contours.

Cheers,
Aaron.

PS: Nice screenshots! I did like those desert-isle missions in TA.

[mauronen]

Very cool snapshots!
A question for Forboding Angel.
How do you made to put vegetations?
Maybe you've used Enviro?

[Forboding Angel]

meronen, the features are there because spring has a way to add features to the maps.

Aaron, I have quite happy with using 1 to 1 honestly, which is why the hitex stuff is commented out. I use textures that repeat very well and you can't see them repeating unless you are on 8% zoom on a 8192 x 8192 map. SO I'm happy

Umm, ya, the contours thing is killing me. BTW, evergreen1h.jpg is about twice as bright as 1c and looks absolutely great in contrast to the rock and reg grass.

One thing that would help a bunch... How do I fatten up the rock walls? As in, how do I get it so that there is more of a chance of them being there? Hoz scale just ends up giving me contour lines. Hey, I had an idea, here is a hm of the canyons map above. Using my above climate could you do a 1 to 1 on it using the climate I posted above? Doesn't need to look the same (as in use whatever tex you need...) So you can see what I'm going through. Scale it up using gimp on cubic and render at 0 - 300 hoz scale 4, don't use photoshop to scale cause it will screw it up badly.

[JavaJones]

Cinepaint ("Film Gimp") will do 16 bit output.

http://cinepaint.org/

- Oshyan