Creating terrain

Post your questions, suggestions and experiences regarding to Image manipulation, 3d modeling and level editing for the Irrlicht engine here.
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GoFor
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2014 5:10 pm

Creating terrain

Post by GoFor »

Hi guys. Do you know maybe in what simple program can I creating terrain - for example?
Seven
Posts: 1030
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:03 pm

Re: Creating terrain

Post by Seven »

using the built in terrainscenenode, you can create terrain using almost any graphics file for the heightmap.

if you are wanting to use something like 3dmax then search youtube for it. Lots of tutorials on there for different modelling programs that can export and then be loaded by irrlicht as a regular mesh.

last but not least, search these forums for the 6 textured shader (triplanerterrain) so that you can texture it a little better.
GoFor
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2014 5:10 pm

Re: Creating terrain

Post by GoFor »

I cant find any good program to simple create terrain :( i cant do it in truespace - to o hard and 3dsmax isnt for my system like a few diffrend programs... guys please help me with find simple program to create terrain for x32 windows xp..... and do you know maybe in what enlargement of map can I load it to irrlicht?
Sorry for my English...
Seven
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Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:03 pm

Re: Creating terrain

Post by Seven »

using the built in terrainscenenode, you can create terrain using almost any graphics file for the heightmap.

check out the tutorials on how to do this
christianclavet
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by christianclavet »

If you only need to create a 3D terrain and nothing else (I mean no programming). You could perhaps check for Terragen. ( http://planetside.co.uk/ )

My last version of IRB ( http://irrrpgbuilder.sourceforge.net ) can create terrain, with tiles that are saved in .B3D (Blitz) 3D models, but the textures are generated with a shader, that use elevation to color the terrain.
Mel
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by Mel »

How do you edit the terrain? i've been thinking about another way to edit terrains, but i think my approach is fairly dumb ^^U (editing a bitmap while the terrain updates in real time with this as source...) Sure you have quite a good thing going on. It is already very advanced, congrats! If perhaps you could swap the terrain textures with a properly splat mapping, or combine the height texture changes with a splat approach, it would definately enhance the looks of it :D And if you could add a shadow generation, it would be the last thing it needed to be perfect!.
"There is nothing truly useless, it always serves as a bad example". Arthur A. Schmitt
christianclavet
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by christianclavet »

For IRB we don't use the terrain scene nodes but meshes. (In 0.3, we use generated HillMeshes) We access the mesh buffer and simply change the values of Y axis. To get the "click" position, we simply do a raycast from the camera to the mouse pointer. Once you get the position of the click, then with simple calculations from the points you can get a distance and "fade" the brush, or make it more rigid. There lots of way to do it.

I've not done the paint splatting (painting the mesh with the mouse) yet, as our terrain shader use elevation as parameters to splat textures. But in the long term, I would like if I know how to paint textures masks. but this will requires using shader passes (I don't know how to do this ATM). And once you get the position of the ray cast on the mesh, I think I will need to calculate this with a ratio (local coord + scale of mesh) to get the proper UV coordinate to write the pixel. (I think it should be between 0.0 to 1.0)

As Mel mentioned, we could also use a bitmap. If you use the terrain scene node, you could access the height map textures, change the values and regenerate the tile. But I'm about sure that method will not provide "realtime" feeback.
hendu
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by hendu »

The SuperTuxKart track editor has live splat painting like that. http://supertuxkart.blogspot.fi/2014/08 ... eased.html

It's GPL, so you can't copy directly to irrRPG, but could be useful to look at.
christianclavet
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by christianclavet »

Thanks Hendu!
Mel
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by Mel »

The same way you change the Y values of the terrains, you can change also the colors of the vertices, then, you can use a texture splatting shader selecting the textures with the vertex colors, unless you have something planned for the vertex colors, that is.

That is how other people does it, and also, it would enable you to add any amount of textures, because for each triangle, you would use, at most, three textures. When a fourth one came into play, you could split the meshbuffer into new meshbuffers, and each meshbuffer would just use three or four or as much textures Irr supported (yes, the drawback is that there would be aditional drawcalls...) but the good part is that you could add an unlimited amount of textures to your terrains :D
"There is nothing truly useless, it always serves as a bad example". Arthur A. Schmitt
hendu
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by hendu »

Or texture arrays ;)
hiker
Posts: 58
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Re: Creating terrain

Post by hiker »

hendu wrote:The SuperTuxKart track editor has live splat painting like that. http://supertuxkart.blogspot.fi/2014/08 ... eased.html

It's GPL, so you can't copy directly to irrRPG, but could be useful to look at.
A rather late reply - sorry, I only noticed this thread now.

Feel free to contact us about the editor. I can't speak for the student who wrote it, but you can certainly ask for a dual license release or so.

Cheers,
Joerg
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