Hi!

I want to know if there is a way to make terrain shadows, but the terrain must be in HMP format or not?
if anyone know the way how to do this please tell me.

greet.

salva

Use the template terrain shader from Conitec (it is already at your hdd). Then paint whatever shadows you like into the blue channel of the color map. That's all.

If you want to generate shadows automatically from trees, houses, hills and so on - then get you a license of FreeWorld3d. That can calculate shadows into a shadow map.

Hi!

I Use Freeworld3d, and it is a very nice tools! with the new road system! I have also created my terrain with it, but I could not create a shadowstexture
why I must resize the terrain for my project in wed (I must make it bigger) then will the shadowstexture not looking good they appear bigger as they sould be If I use the terrain size as is in Freeworld, then it is too small for my purpose, and the terrain in freeworld is 1024x1024 size!
but in wed is very very small, and when I increase the size in wed, the texture are seen very bad!!


Greet.


salva

You should use the shader. So you can tell how often a texture tiles over your terrain. So it cannot look "very bad". You can use 3 different tiling textures and a shadowmap with the shader. But you need a blending texture that tells the shader which of the texture should appear on several locations of the terrain. Just paint red and green channels for texture 2 and 3. Blue channel is for the shadow map.

You can scale your terrain in MED to make it as big as you like.

Learn how to create a terrain in Freeworld with Layers and then export this. You will find all what you need.
And shadow baking is a simple click of a mouse in Freeworld.

I think I should make a tutorial sometimes to show how to do all that in detail.

3DGS is really really behind all others in terms of terrain !

It's like prehistoric terrain making with 3DGDS when other 3D package have standard ones.


We have only a shader multitexturing that is really really basic.

Take BV engine it has complete terrain editing/painting tools
(done in some months or less after users requests !

AND YOU CAN PAINT AS MANY LAYERS AS YOU WANT (that's to you to choose performance, number of layers ..)

Pfffff 3DGS as 3 that's good , but if it was user too choose the number
it would be lot more better.


Torque has that from years.

well , i hope 3DGS will have one decent real terrain editor some day.

even RPG games deliver terrain editors for moding (Titan Quest, Never Winter Nights 2 , Oblivion etc ...)

why 3DGS is soo sooooo behind for terrain ?


Like always my bad talking , it's just waht i feel when i use 3DGS and others
3D packages !

It's not true that we only have 3 "layers" at our disposal ... Like ello pointed out some time ago, you should make a skin texture which has a lot of details already and the main colors/textures. (Since 3dgs chucks the terrain, this base texture's size may be quite large actually ..) Then through the shader you add 3 or more detail textures through multitexturing... (Infact 3dgs support about double that amount anyways.) It's a matter of how you're using the options you've got, not limiting yourself to blind stare on some pre-made features like in BV. Yes, it's nice and it's very fast when making terrains, but still ...

Cheers

You can simply write an ffp shader with smee2 that can deal with much more than 3 textures. But I find 3 textures plus shadows sufficient for a good terrain. I can use sand for the beach, grass for the nature and rock for the steep slopes. You can also mix stone and sand, or whatever to create mixtures of those 3. Why should I use more?

Nevertheless a good terrain editor is really useful. Torque's editor or freeworld 3d show how it can be done. IxeX2 is for 3dgs and could be used as an alternative. GameEdit will support this as well. But I have no idea when it's done.

If you need a good terrain, just make it with one of those tools or wait for GameEdit.

Hi!

Yes I agree with theexpert, 3DGS "is becoming" a good engine, but some characteristics like for create terrain they should be to the base of all!
in fact many engines also more recent than 3dgs they have an excellent terrain editor. And not only...
For what you say to using the shader I have already told in an other thread that 3 texture is much few! for me. And if you can make a tutorial for that what
you say would be very usefull!


Greet.

salva

Sorry Phemox ,
but i prefer powerfull workflow :
writting shaders each time i want a layer for terrain .... pfuuuu ...

in BV engine it detects how many layers you have loaded and do as many passes
as layers you have :

NO MISSING TOOLS TO CODE.... sorry , but when i use BV (it could be Torque also)
i have a panel for terrain editing incorpored in the editor like with F11
on Torque qith all things we need !

3DGS could do that and that ... ok , but for people wanting to make 2D/3D art for the game and script only ... it's very very behind for terrain

Now yes you could use irrlicht , ogre3D , or 3DGS and code lot of complete tools
How many time will it take ?

if you like coding ok , if you hate coding , and prefer only to od game logic
that' s bad to hear : "write or modify that".

well let's wait for 3DGS to evolve !

This is a topic that, honestly, should have been rendered moot months and months ago. That 3DGSs horribly lacking terrain system is *still* the subject of many people's (mine included) frustrations because it is truly so out-dated, archaic, unintuitive, ugly and just plain absurdly implemented really makes me wonder just what in the world the developers are thinking.

And, besides, wasn't it at least a year or so ago, maybe longer, that a brand-new terrain and rendering system was supposed to be implemented? What happened?

3DGS is a wonderful system. It really is. But, c'mon... to still have as poor a terrain system in place as it does after all this time is well past inexcusable.