Grome, L3DT or anything else for terrains

#1 Welcome to Torque! :)

L3DT is pretty cool! It has an exporter that works with Torque 3D right out of the box. It has just been updated to work really conveniently with Torque 3D in fact.

Grome has better tools, but it only gets you the height map. The rest you need to fix by hand. You have a better control over the terrain, but it also costs you a lot more.

Another tool worth mentioning is GeoControl 2. It looks very realistic and the screenshots are truly breathtaking - unfortunately I have not been able to work with it yet.

For TGEA I've been using Grome. For Torque 3D my vote goes to L3DT.

#2
To add my two cents...

IMO the two best terrain tools are World Machine and GeoControl. Both are pretty unique and complement each other well.

GeoControl2 has a unique multi-resolution approach to terrain generation and a host of high-quality procedural filters. If you want to save a little, GeoControl1 is still available and, while lacking some cool new features of GC2, it is already rather great. I find myself still going back to it for its brush tool (as great as isolines are).

World Machine is different in that it does not work off a fixed heightmap resolution at all. Rather, you put node networks together and finally export out a fixed sampling of a region of this procedural network.

Grome is very expensive (overpriced really), has shit licensing/activation terms (*), has a far more manual approach to terrain editing, and personally, I found it has just about nothing to offer when compared to GC2 and WM2.

Worked some with L3DT for TGEA. Remember it rendered an entire week for a 16k terrain :)

(*) Not being able to use the software I bought because I first have two ask the developer to re-register my account to a different email address because I couldn't buy it with my primary email address because they didn't accept any on public hosters and the other email address is gone now and then second having to tell them I have reinstalled on a different machine and need a new activation, really gets me. I paid for this software.

#3 Many thanks for great replies,
I have looked at Geocontrol2 and World machine, I like the look for Geo control2, how easy is it to export to T3D as L3dt has a direct exporter?

Thanks again
Pete

#4

Quote:Worked some with L3DT for TGEA. Remember it rendered an entire week for a 16k terrain :)

Those big atlas terrains took forever to generate.

yeah, I wish we could get some of that terrain flexibility back at least as far as larger terrain with good detail. I think that the current system while it does have a few good feature that were very sought after for a long time it has just given up too much. terrain at a distance just looks awful in T3D

it seem that in order to get the terrain to look reasonable you have to turn the draw distance on the materials way up but then that introduces other issues. Honestly I think that there needs to be some sort of clip mapping and higher resolution textures brought back in for the distance stuff.

The 2048 for the base texture that it is right now just doesn't cut it.

#5
@peterski777
GC2 and WM2 as terrain tools are pretty much all about heightmaps (though both can be used to create color maps and WM2 can also output meshes) so exporting and importing into any other terrain tool should be pretty easy.

Also, now that Atlas is no more in T3D, there isn't much magic to importing terrain data and its pretty easy to generate the necessary maps in just about any program.

@James
Yep, mid-distance texturing definitely is a weak point with the current texturing. While I would hate to see clipmaps coming back, I'd be very interested to see virtual texturing implemented in Torque.

#6 you mean kinda like Tech5's mega texture? yeah that would be ideal.

I think that are many people that would pay $300-400 for addon that did this. Maybe more.

#7
Yep, in that direction. There's been some interesting development going on there lately.

As with Atlas, the editing side will be somewhat of a challenge and it should definitely be integrated into the toolset this time rather than relying solely on importers.

#8 Even open source Irrlicht can use 4Gb texture for terrain and Torque3D with so complicated and useful editors cannot. I wonder...

You can create spectacular terrains 20x20 km, use great forest tool, create rivers , lakes , roads etc very easily, but 4Kx4K texture does not fit for this, could we expect progress on this direction in the near future?

I think it is urgent for many Torque3D users.

And of course, multiterrain support too necessary for big terrains.

And as James said, 300-400$ for addon it is fair trade. I want it.

#9 Thanks again for help,
I am quiet new to this and as stated programs like Geo are used mainly just for Height maps? so would I be better off with L3DT as its cheaper and does same thing, its not the money as I can buy either just not sure now what would be better.
sorry for questions but thanks for the help

regards
Pete

#10
You can either do the texturing in Torque 3D on top of the imported heightmap or, with a little more work you can use GC2 or WM2 to save out opacity maps as the basis for your texturing and then import this along with your heightmap into T3D.

L3DT probably has the benefit, though, of having a more direct path for setting up and transferring both texturing and heightmaps.

#11 actually I think just being able to take the base texture up to 4096x4096 would be a pretty nice improvement. Also it would be really nice to be able to use a base normal map as well. L3DT does all of these. Of course being able to use the light-map from L3DT would be nice as well. especially if these could be brought in at a higher resolution than the base texture.

#12 I'm using 4096x4096 base textures. You only have to change some lines of engine code that limits to 2048. In fact, I even try 8192x8192... it's very difficult to work with them in T3D. It crashes are very often. To get a base tecture of 8192x8192 I chop the terrain in 4 terrainblocks.