I have been tooling around lots with terrain lately. I've utterly convinced myself I wasnt going out to pay 300$ for bryce and instead use what i had at my disposal. I had drawn several heightmaps in greyscale in 1024/1024 (opting for the larger in-game terrain map) and created a size 2048/2048 skin for it.

So naturally, having used the largest possible size greyscale map to create my terrain, I assumed the terrain would turn out rather large in-game. Sadly this was not the case.
Take a look at a few screens of my terrain:

pretty decent terrain for something that took me the better part of 2 hours. Now wouldnt It ABSOLUTELY OWN if I were able to walk my character around in this 'vast' landscape? you bet. But, as luck would have it.. this just doesnt seem to work out.
The pics you're looking at, have my terrain scaled up by 3 times. When I insert a model of regular size, his head comes up nearly one third of the height of the tallest peak in this terrain. To make matters worse, when the terrain is scaled this high, the character will fall through the terrain into nothingness when trying to walk up a slope. I had similar results as I scaled down the terrain progressively, even when the terrain was scaled 0.5 and the player scaled 1.0, I was still able to find a spot where the player would fall through.

Someone want to give me a hand with any of this? I'd really appreciate any help/input you can offer...

hmm, the images arent displaying that well for me, just for reference here are the URLs to my images:

www.geocities.com/penneywize9/shot_1.jpg

www.geocities.com/penneywize9/shot_2.jpg

(you may have to open those in seperate windows)

Your screen shots aren't there. I'll try to help when I see them though .

Okay. I saw the shots and it looks pretty good. A few questions.

- How many polygons are you setting MED for when you first load your BMP?
- What model are you using for player?

Also, I usually make my height maps either 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 and thern scale to 4 in WED. I haven't run into any problems but I have heard of the falling through issue.

Hey, thanks for responding.. Okay, here is the config I used when I loaded the heightmap image into med.

Vertices horizontal 33
Vertices vertical 33
triangle size horizontal 31.968
triangle size vertical 31.968

I used the guard model from the geo-metriks supplementary model pack.. with action player_walk

can't you just size down your guard a lot? make the guard really really small?

by the way i also have a question with terrain... every time i make a greyscale map of terrain, it's blurred, smooth, perfect. but when i make it in MED, it has sharp, jagged hills and peaks.. when the bmp has totally smoothe transisions from white to black. and adding more vertices just added more peak, not smoothness..

WHAT IS THERE TO DO? i want like halo or TRIBES 2.. smooth, rolling hills. i've done it twice before with 3dgs, but it only worked twice.

by the way.. i can't make a huge terrain map, so i'm making a bunch of little sections to put together so it looks like a big one.

naw.. making the guard model smaller wouldnt help any, because based on my testing its fair to say that models with a low scale value will tend to fall thru more often on terrain than would a model of greater scale.. remember i first tried my terrain, as terrain scaled 3.0 and guard model 1.0.. and it still had horrible collision detection..
Argh.. I really want to get to the bottom of this =)

my solution is not the real one but it works fine for my project.

i use invisible level blocks for flat surfaces of terrain. for ie. about 64-128 quant height level blocks fits perfect for me.
place level block base level or flat levels and see how collision works.
i hope this helps you.

already tried this, doesnt help out at all if you plan to have your character walk up small hills and traverse mountains.. I know there is a method of making terrain perfectly solid, I am probably just using it wrong. Foucault just said he never had problems.. Hopefully he can get back to me on this or someone equally helpful. Thanks for the suggestions though.

EDIT: ok forgot to mention, the total poly count on my terrain was in the range of 4000 polys.

I'm having the same problem as you penywize. In all the terains I've ever made, almost none of them had collision detection. Those that did only had partial collision detection. Yes, I saved it as a HMP, not a MDL. What difference does the amount of polygons made to collision detection and why does 3d gamestudio warp the terain when I go close to the side of a hill when the terain is scalled up heaps. If scalling isn't good for terains, then how am I supposed to make a large terain that will take up the entire level- eg miles and miles of terain like in flight sims.

From what I've seen so far, all 3d gamestudio is good for is indoor shooters. It isn't capable of doing flight sims or racing car games. No matter how many postes I've made on terain problems, no one can help me. Surly someone know how to make large terains with collision detection sutible for flight sims or racing car games!