Applying Shadow Maps

Was tinkering around with putting a shadow/lightmap on a terrain.

Is there a good rule of thumb for what index each one works best in and what texture flags are desirable?

Say you have a Texture map, Colormap, and light/shadow map for the terrain. What index would each go best on and what texture flags would you use?

Are brushes what's normally used for terrains?

Some lightmappers use layer 0 for the shadow maps, some use layer 1, in the end it doesn't realy matter. You may use them with the multiplying blend mode, or multiply blend 2 thingie. So the darker a lightmap texel is, the "less fullbright" will the final mix be.

Not sure about Colormaps, never use them. You may also make use of Vertex Colors, btw.

I don't understand your question about terrains. You may use a texture or a brush. A brush may also contain textures. It's kind of a containier for material properties.

Blitz Terrains may not be very useful since you can hardly use multiple textures with them, and they also "pop in" due to LOD, I'd say they are good for water, but that's it.

I'd rather use a meshbased Terrain tool that is using vertex alpha to blend various textures. Remember Rifrafs relase of the Free Landscape Editor - that unfortunately has vanished from the servers.

Considering the fact that this was an open source project I really think about to add some userfriendlyness to the wip version that I currently use and release it the sooner or later.

There are more apps of this kind, like ALE oder CLE: http://www.blitzbasic.com/toolbox/toolbox.php?cat=7

Yeah I wish there was a solid terrain solution.

If there was a function that loaded a heightmap, texture map, lightmap, and broke the terrain up into a specified number of segments ie:

LoadSmartTerrain("hmap.bmp","tmap.bmp","lmap.bmp",4)

I'm surprised this hasn't been done yet or if it has it's not been shared. I'm kinda working on this atm. If you could load a height map and then break it up into segments then they would be handled automatically by blitz. Meaning when a terrain segment was behind the camera it wouldn't be shown. No extra computing effort needed.

I'll start a new thread and maybe some people will help it come to fruition.

I've seen the other thread. good work thanks. Please excuse my pessimism concerning terrains. I think terrains never really were used by "the masses" for th eknown limitations, including and especially the lack of support for individual textures for parts of the terrain (unlike eg. DB Classic).

With projects like the mentioned ALE Blitz Terrains became partially obsolete. After the release of the open source project Free Landscape Editor by RifRaf things definitively changed. Terrain is still good for water IMHO.

We quickly made a great tool out of FLE. I only want to mention there was a function named slope texture. With a single click you were able to texture everything with a rocky texture that was a steep slope, where like in nature no grass would grow.

See this image:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/gallery/view_pic.php?id=1362&gallery=&page=1

I find the problem with terrains is, they always have to be square. So, say, creating a floating island or such, most terrain programs just don't cut it, so i do them in a modeller :o) Good luck with this btw, i've been watching your progress.