Regional Alpha Maps for Giant Terrains

[David Walters]

EDIT: I thought of a workaround . I make my own tool that is a post process on the set of full terrain alpha maps - cutting them up and remapping values to reduce the local count. This wouldn't be too hard and I can do my own thing with region shapes and sizes.

I'll leave this post here though ... there might be benefits to doing this within L3DT I haven't realised yet

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Hi, I've got quite a big request for the alpha map generator.

I've made an engine capable of handling arbitrary large terrains by streaming in a set of local 'chunks' from a giant terrain asset. The chunk comprises a block of height data, and a texture map. Currently this texture is a raw image - but I want to change that to be an alpha map so I can lower the resolution of the texture data and take advantage of the various other benefits of splat maps.

So I've made myself a 16Km square terrain (4096 x 4m ) but I've run into a bit of a problem. I want to create a highly varied world with a large number of overall textures - but where the number in any one region is actually relatively small (three or four sand textures in one area, two or three ice textures in another, etc.)

Unfortunately, as far as I can see - the alpha map generator can only treat the terrain as one region with one texture list. So my request is: Could you add a starting page to the process where you can specify a tiled region size (square is fine). From this, the map is auto-allocated as usual be with seperate texture lists per region -- allowing individual lists to be much shorter and the number of alpha maps reduced greatly.

The editor would need to be changed to look something like the following (ordinarily the list would be 20/30 textures). Note each cell would have it's own unique coverage layout:



You'd operate it by clicking on each tile to setup the editing list - Perhaps even zooming in to make the coverage easier to see (note the zoom-out button to return to maximum)




The export process would then be a case of showing the 'maximum' number of images, and operating a bit like the mozaic mode which I guess would be replaced by this? Possible downside: I don't understand high-res mode to know if you'd have problems with edge cases.

I realise this is a big request, but I think something like this would really help for large regional terrains.

[Aaron]

Hi David,

Good idea. I also agree that this would be better handled in post-processing, as it would otherwise make an already complicated alpha mapping user interface and calculation algorithm more so.

Please let me know if you would like any assistance with decoding files or using the plugin API (if you decide to go down that path).

Cheerio,
Aaron.

[David Walters]

Having had a bit more time to think about it (and now I've done a bit more reading of the wiki) I've realised that directly using the attributes map would make loads more sense - and in fact you've already allowed for that by providing the export list function. This file should be easy to automatically parse, so really all I need is the time to sit down and extend my conversion tool to do the remapping into alpha maps.

Thanks for the help, and again for making such a useful application!