Terrains...

You know how you sometimes get stuck on making something look better... you've been neglecting it for a while because it's really not that important but sometimes you just need a discraction to clear your head... Well... I decided to make the terrain look better in Helicopter.







It's sort of procedual... I've got a bunch of images and edited them to make them more suited to a game... The map editor then takes these images and blends them according to heights of the terrain and light maps it, and of couse it colours the roads etc accordingly too!...

Anyway... I think it looks quite nice!

Am I right in thinking the roads are actually a mesh laid on top of the terrain? (just going by the sharp edges).

That being the case, why do the roads appear on the texture also?

The whole terrain is a mesh, the roads (and other elements) are different tiles within that mesh.

It is made up of 256 meshes (16x16), each mesh is 32x32 quads, each quad 4units². Each 4unit quad has a 256x256 texture on it which effectivly gives you a detail level of 131072 x 131072 pixels.

The whole thing is vertex coloured by the texture, so it's not actually a texture as such.

The bizarre thing when you're working to scale means that every pixel on the textures on the terrain is in reality 1.5cm²

This screenshot will probably make it clearer

this is coming along quite nicely... you've managed to get the terrain in and maintain a consistant look to the scene...

... sometimes that's one of the hardest things to do.

--Mike

Rob,

Have you checked out Freeworld.
It looks great. Check out the road creation video showing the new road creation. Very cool.

http://www.freeworld3d.org/index.html

Might fit into your pipeline very well.

Allan

freeworld, but hey it's not for free. Tho, not a bad tool I think.

Rob - nice terrain. I really like the way you made this huge terrain so detailed.

I think overall your gfx looks fine, but the terrain looks too blurred / lowres to my taste... but great work so far!

Well, you could redo your terrain in TerraGen to avoid any infringement on that game, at least that's what I would go and do...