L3DT Users' Community

I was rendering out a alpha map with 7 textures (we have support for 8 now in our build of TGEA) but ran across this little problem. Whenever I export the alpha maps as png tiles (512x512) the exporter will not export all the tiles on the second alpha map. It seems to skip over exporting tiles that don't have any coverage on them. This becomes a problem when we try to bring them into TGEA as TGEA wont compile an opacity map if a tile is missing. This almost seems like a feature gone wrong. Like maybe L3dt was trying to keep tile file size down by not exporting blank tiles.



Any help on fixing this would be appreciated.

Hi Calsa,

Right you are. Mosaic maps don't save empty tiles by default. This is because some mosaic maps can be very large and very sparse, so it can waste considerable time and space to read/write empty data.

Anyway, I've changed L3DT so that it always writes all tiles when called to export a mosaic map, such as when using the Atlas2 export plugin or the 'File->Export->map' menu option. I'll PM you a link to the updated installer (it's a dev build of L3DT for Torque, which also happens to feature a mod to the Atlas2 export plugin to support 8 textures in blended terrain).

If anyone else also experiences this same problem, please PM/e-mail me and I will send you the appropriate download link. Otherwise, this change will be included in the next service release, which might be available sometime in November (I've not decided on the schedule yet).

Best regards,
Aaron.

Aaron, I just finished creating a terrain using two alpha maps. The second map had missing tiles. Is the latest v 2.6 not exporting all tiles, including blank tiles?

Hi Dennis,

Version 2.6 won't save blank tiles; I made the change to force blank tiles to be saved about a month after v2.6 was released, so you'll need to use a more recent version (i.e. v2.7 beta) to make use of that change.

Best regards,
Aaron.

Oops. I thought that was a current version. I guess I need to pay better attention! Thanks.

Hate to do this, but it looks like this bug is back in the latest beta build.

Hi Calsa,

There's been no change to this feature. Blank tiles are written when mosaic maps are exported, but not when they are saved as part of the project (since they waste time and space).

To export the alpha maps with blank tiles, you can use either the 'Export alpha map files now' option in the alpha map wizards, or use the 'File->Export->Export map' option to export the alpha map as a mosaic.

Best regards,
Aaron.