Carsten wrote:Hello all,
after a long period of consideration, we're slowly getting ready for some serious work on the long-planned Ca3DE TechDemo.
Brief overview:
The TechDemo map is to consist of two parts: A large outdoor area and a building. The player will start somewhere in the open terrain, and eventually enter the building. The building is intended to be a high-tech, deserted facility (e.g. a research laboratory "after catastrophe"), and will be more precisely specified and defined later.
TechDemo Step #1, the Outdoor Terrain:I'm currently experimenting with these programs in order to create a suitable heightmap (inclusive a matching texture): Both are nice, but both have also their own quirks.
- Will be in tropic climate, as this is most colorful and has most options for e.g. showing vegetation, animals, water, etc.
- Should have a sea coast, and possibly islands and lakes.
- Should have some kind of natural path that leads the player towards the building, with some interesting sight-seeing perspectives along the way. Might employ bridges, rocks, outdoor stairs, railing, wooden signs etc. to augment and aid this.
- Will laterally be limited/bounded by water (ocean) and steep rocks.
- Most TechDemo effects will be presented inside the building (to be detailed later), but the outdoor parts can have some, too.
- Must not be too large - the player is on foot.
- Heightmap should not exceed 1025*1025 pixels, texture should not exceed 1024*1024 pixels, or else we exclude too many people with older hardware.
- Access to the building - VERY IMPORTANT:
The building, which is intended to have subterranean floors, must probably be accessed from the edge of the terrain, via an entrace that is dig into rocks, roughly like on this screenshot: http://www.ca3d-engine.de/e107_files/im ... ic0001.jpg
The walls however must of course at some point be bounded by rocky terrain.
I'm also working on other solutions, so that we might place the building somewhere in the mid of the terrain. However, don't count on that -- think of the building to be at the border of the terrain, at least where the stairs/elevator to the lower levels it.
Note that other buildings without subterranean floors can be anywhere on the terrain.- More or better ideas? Post here!
The really big problem is that we sometimes have to manually "flatten" the heightmap, e.g. where buildings are planned, or paths or roads. L3DT does not support manual heightmap editing at all, and Terragen has the very dangerous feature of sometimes raising the other terrain if you lower terrain elsewhere!
That is, dig somewhere a very deep hole, and you'll find that Terragen raises the rest of the terrain! &|
Except for employing traditional paint programs like Gimp, PSP, PhotoShop etc. I've not yet found a good solution for this problem.
Even worse, the problems continue: Say we have paved a road in the heightmap, it seems that only Terragen is able to auto-create a nice texture for it...
If somebody is interested in experimenting with these programs, too, or maybe even wants to create heightmaps + textures that meet the above specs, please post and discuss them here!
I'll also post my findings (which programs and workflow are best etc.) and hopefully some screenshots here, too.
Outlook on TechDemo step #2:
This will include a release of the updated CaWE editor, and include the initial creation of the TechDemo.cmap (importing the terrain, creating some initial brushes and entities, etc.).
Carsten wrote:After having spent yet another full day with nothing but finding out how terrains are best made and what tools can be used for this task, I think that it is time to share my findings:
First, there are always two parts: The heightmap and its texture.
Interestingly, these two parts are often created in several steps by several distinct programs.
Heightmaps are often created (semi-)automatically, and then hand-tuned in a second step. For example, one might create the large hills of a terrain with an automatic tool, and then add flat areas for buildings, roads, etc. manually. Sometimes one also wants a mountain or a lake in a specific place, in which case also some kind of hand-work is required.
Textures for the terrain are created next, based on the form of the finished heightmap. Usually, this too is done (semi-)automatically, but a hand-tuning pass must often follow, because the generating tool has normally no notion of the asphalt surfaces of roads etc.
Thus, we have four steps for creating a terrain:The bad news is that each of these four steps may require a different software! %-6 &|
- Create the heightmap with an automatic tool.
- Hand-tune the heightmap.
- Create the texture with an automatic tool (and the heightmap).
- Hand-tune the texture.
Lets start from bottom, then work up:
Step 4, hand-tuning the texture, clearly asks for PhotoShop, PaintShopPro, TheGimp, etc.
For step 3, auto-creating the texture, I was considering L3DT, but now I think that Terragen is still unbeaten. An excellent Terragen resource is Peter Kleiners website at http://www.terradreams.de with many great downloads, tutorials, infos, help, etc.
I'm also not aware of any program (free or commercial) that comes close to Terragen.
Steps 1 and 2 are the truly problematic ones, and the reason why making terrains once more took me yet another day of nothing but research. I considered a lot of possibly suited programs, and here is a list of those who survived my initial criteria:I've not yet tried all of them, and unfortunately, I've not yet found a satisfying candidate either.
- L3DT
Automatic terrain creation is driven by a "design map". Interesting idea and apparently good quality. No hand-editing possible.- Terragen
The standard. Auto-creation seems okay, but hand-editing is spartanic and not recommeded due to the dangerous feature of altering the heightmap in places that are not currently worked on.- PhotoShop, PSP, Gimp
Well, of course there are no terrain-specific features here, but the general flexibility of these programs may still help with hand-editing. Last resort.- Terraformer
- TerraBrush
- planetGenesis
- World Machine
- TerraMaker
- GeoFrac 2000
- GeoScape 3D
- Geomantics Landformer Pro
I found this one really difficult to use. Apparently it's more for turning elevation contour maps into heightmaps.- Geomantics Genesis IV
Freeware version available.- Leveller
By Daylon Graphics, commercial.
L3DT and TerraGen are probably well suited for heightmap auto-creation (step 1), but others (Terraformer, TerraBrush, World Machine, TerraMaker) seem to be good, too.
For hand-editing (step 2), which I found the worst so far, all my hopes are on Terraformer, TerraBrush, World Machine and TerraMaker. I've not yet tried any of them, but will so soon.
Scott wrote:you know a temp solution for creating an acurate heightmap is the Unreal2004 level editor. You have interactive tools to raise and lower your ground etc, not to mention it saves your created heightmap to a texture package which you can easily export to a bitmap. Another thing it does is texture layers. It creates masks based on where you paint your textures on the terrain. The texture is tiled like 50 times underneath each mask and it makes great looking terrain. You can export the masks as well. I'm not sure if you can build a multi-layered masked shader in ca3de, but that would be a great solution if it was possible.
Carsten wrote:Scott, thanks for the info. Do you have any links to any screenshots?
On the other hand, we need of course a solution that is both high-quality and independent from "competitor" products (and integrates well with the rest of CaWE / Ca3DE).
I think that these goals can be achieved with Terragen and its related tools.
In fact, I've made some good progress with evaluating these programs, and think that I'll be able to outline the required tools and proper workflow soon.
Here is a post of mine (in the German language though) in this regard: http://www.terradreams.de/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7654
Carsten wrote:Another small update:
Here is a scene that I have in mind for the outdoor terrain style:
http://www.notfromthisworld.com/assets/ ... BT_001.jpg
And here a few more:
http://www.martin-brunker.de/tutorials/tutorial.htm
http://www.duf-net.de/Duf_D/Download/Tu ... tuto2.html
http://www.notfromthisworld.com/html/be ... al_de.html
http://www.terradreams.de/gallery/categ ... p?cat_id=3
We will require all kinds of detail models for such terrains. For example:
Rocks, bridges, railings, signs, small buildings, plants, whales skeletons, satellite uplink stations etc. Anyting that can be there on a deserted, tropic island with a secret research lab.
These kind of items would be the next logical step in developing the TechDemo.
They can be made in CaWE and/or any modelling software (3DS, Lightwave, etc.), for future combintation with the acutall TechDemo.cmap.
I know that this is still pretty vague, and hope to be able to release a terrain for viewing in the Ca3DE TerrainViewer soon.
Thrawn wrote: Just a suggestion:
3. Create the texture with an automatic tool (and the heightmap).
This step can be done with L3DT. It is very flexible and you can create an own climate there easily - so it would be suitable for the techdemo. Those who know the program know that it uses textures to draw the terrain texture so you can do many nice thing with it!
***Edit***
Talked with Carsten in the IRC-channel: TerraGen seems to be better for doing this.
[ Edited Thu Jul 28 2005, 10:16PM ]
Thrawn wrote:There is a game called "Pirates of the XXI Century" that looks in a way good - it has a tropical setting. Here are some shots that might be good for ideas for the tech demo...
