TerraFormat and Terraed online.
Community Forums/Developer Stations/TerraFormat and Terraed online.
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| Order Terraed on : ------------------ www.3dgametool.com/project_terraed.htm Try Terraed and TerraFormat demo : ---------------------------------- www.blitz3dfr.com/terraed_projet/TerraEd.zip Try a demo map made with terraed : ---------------------------------- www.blitz3dfr.com/click/clic.php?url=http://www.blitz3dfr.com/mes_projets/landscape-V2.zip     |
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| Wow. That's very nice. Love the birds and butterflys. Guess I'll head over to your site and have a look around. edit: The check is in the mail...;) |
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| Nice, cant wait to check my email for the update :) |
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| I do :) |
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| thanks Philippe! nice product and I plan on using the new heigtmap editor. I wonder about the performance changes if TerraEd didn't use Blitz terrains. Much faster?? I should test this quick first but thought of loading the heightmap as a b3d mesh and then applying textures, in the way that you do now to the blitz terrain. That doesn't handle the object placement that you do now but I suppose, to hack it quick, the blitz terrain could be loaded temporarily for object placement and then released, leaving the terrain mesh. thanks- |
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It works wonderfully just as it is.  Ya think? |
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| Nacra I have made some test with terrain mesh and i don't think it's the good way ... Why ? because terrain mesh don't use LOD like blitz terrain and you can obtain the same result with less polygon with standar blitz terrain. But you can alway create your heightmap and in your 3D software create a plane and apply your heightmap picture for modifiy plane height, save this 3D terrain in B3D fromat and use it in terraed ? maybe a solution ? |
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| Nacra, you can try my terrain mesh system, with child system for occlusion :-). It's more speed than a blitz terrain with LOD ... You can find it here http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=34168 You can download a little demo here : http://bond357.free.fr/down/Tropicale.rar Or an occlucion demo here: http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=33472 All the texture are do by Filax ... You can create Heightmap and position object with TerraEd and after create a little lib to use the terrain mesh ... |
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| thanks for the info guys, I'll check out Eole's terrain code. the occlusion demo is running about 22fps here on a GeForce3. |
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| What is your config ?,and there is 2000 trees, at about 450 Poly in the map... |
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| dual pIII, just 256mb ram, geforce 3 ti. The geforce3 is getting pretty old and slow but I do like it as a reality check for customers with older machines. But boy, the new ATI X800 sounds useful. :-) http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040504 |
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| Terraed is coded on a 1.5 Ghz + GEForce 2MX |
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| Of course there's a problem with using Blitz terrains - there's only 2 UV sets. This means you always end up with a single texture over the entire surface with vertex coloring to hide it (like in all the screens above). This is unrealistic and lacks variation. With meshes however, there is no limit. That's what ALE is for. |
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| Maybe skitchy :) but blitz terrain make good result too with terraed :) I think that ALE and Terraed must be used together... for creating good result. |
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| It seems like most people were happy enough with a single texture over the terrain in Farcry, I haven't heard anyone complain too much about that. So I don't see what the problem is with terrains. Its all about making the texture look nice and in a high enough resolution together with a good detail map I would say. |
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| sure ! |
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| Zawran, how do you know the number of textures on terrains in Farcry? In fact this is simply impossible if you want a non-repeating (I'm not talking about just using detail detail textures) texture *and* a fine resolution in the same time *and* big terrains. Take a 2048*2048 terrain, where one unit is one meter (view distance = 1 kilometer), say you want 16 pixels per meter (that's 1 pixel every 6 centimeters, really not that much), you end up with a 4 Gb texture. Try to stick that in your card... So you do have to either make compromises (repeating textures, with no local control). Or use techniques that will assemble several little textures at runtime (by assembling little terrian meshes and/or using splatting techniques), meaning you simply can't use blitz terrains. For little terrains with little detail or repeating textures though (that is: *not* farcry-like), take a blitz terrain, they will be just fine. And actually even with repeating textures, you can have nice results, using multitexturing and some texture scaling over blitz terrains (Filax's Trium games were great examples of this). But *no* local control (apart vertex colouring). There are cases where this might really not ba approriate. |
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| I had been playing around with the sandbox editor and to me it looks like they use one big texture stretched across a terrain generated from a heightmap image, the same as blitz does, but I could be wrong and if I am then sorry about that. |
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| but blitz terrain make good result too Not really. One texture stretched across the entire terrain will never compare to multiple textures, tiled across the terrain, using vertex alpha to blend them. |
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