Hey guys,

Just signed up to the forums, but I've been aware of the 3DGS community for a long time and for some reason, i always get drawn back to it so I finally decided to join and get serious about working with 3DGS. I only have the Free version right now, but I plan on upgrading eventually.

I've already worked through all the workshops and stuff so I have the basics of 3DGS again, but saw in one of the workshops a recommended terrain editor, "Terragen". After looking into it more I came to find that Terragen 2 creates some of the best landscapes I've ever seen along with a myriad of customization options as well.

I've been looking around, but there's no direct answer I've found yet, is their a way to import directly to 3DGS through a plugin or something or do I have to export it to 3DS Max first? And even if I have to go through 3DS, where do I go from there?

Has anyone else in here tried working with Terragen and run into some issues? I'd love to get this worked out, I have a great idea in the works.

Glad to be apart of the community!

Thanks,

Ryan

hi

the terrain generator, what I really recommend to use is L3DT. it has a great free version, but you have to use heightmap to export from L3DT, and import to MED. it requires some tweaking to get the same heights as in L3DT (scale z), but works fine. textures also can be used fine, you can create a single skin, or a multi skin. in the latter case you have to export texture aplha-s from L3DT what you can use with the terraintex.fx, which works fine with 3DGS free.

in case of Terragen 1, the export import possibilities are the same, but I use it rather for sky cube creation (check my homepage for a tutorial). I have not really used Terragen 2 because it is not free, and a bit more complex to use.

another tool is PnP Terrain Creator, offering hmp export, thus no conversion required for 3DGS. it places the blended texture to the first skin, and the tiled textures with blending on alpha to further skins. it is not compatible with the default 3DGS terraintex.fx, but fine with my terraintex.fx modification I'm using in my editor. but it has no such a realistic result as L3DT or Terragen (or at least I was not able to achieve it).

there are some other tools like Earth Sculptor or Bryce, which are not so cheap but not better than L3DT free.

I hope it helped you.

Thanks for the response Sivan!

Before I even posted this I had stumbled across your page and was admiring your Map Builder. It's pretty impressive so far, well done.
Also, thanks for the tip on L3DT. I've heard of it just never looked into it, but I'm going to now.

Speaking of your map builder though, I don't even know if it's possible, but do you plan to add a terrain generator at some point in the future?

thanks. I had interest and plans of it, but it is a too complex task, and since there are a couple of free tools, it does not really worth the time and work. maybe once I will deal with it, but first I should dig into the SDK too to be able to save a newly generated terrain as hmp, and currently there are much more important things to do...