Best way to make heightmaps?

#1 I am pretty much a beginner to modelling. I was hoping some of you advanced people could help me by answering some quick modelling questions. Any help would be greatly appreciated.(I use Milkshape 1.6.0)

1. How do you find out how many poly's your model has?
2. What is the average amount of poly's for your basic FPS player model. (for example, a grunt from Half-Life)
3. What is the best program for skinning a model?
4. What is the best program for animating a model?
5. Which comes first, skinning or animating?

Thanks!

#2 ...cant understand what that post is doing here..! :D

#3 Brad, buddy, don't hijack this thread. You've already created a thread asking the exact same questions. Posting the same questions here, when someone else is waiting for an answer on another subject is somewhat rude.

Simon, sorry, I can't really help you. I don't know much about heightmaps.

#4 Hehe, another problem; a heightmap is 256 pixels. How many meters are that? (n00b question ..hrmm)
How many pixels are for exampel 500 m?

#5 I use bryce they have a terrain editor, then I copy the screen, pastw that in photoshop and pull out the heightmap and walla new map made to order

#6 HMmmmmmm

#7 I no longer use the heightmaps but model the terrain manually.
Anyway.. Photshop is an excellent tool for creating heightmaps. Unfortunately the only advise I can give is trail and error... and practise.

#8 I use PhotoShop to create the base layout of the map using a 256 x 256 greyscale image (actually, I start with a larger image to work with and reduce it to 256 x 256). Then I fine tune with the built in editor.

You might want to look at some Tribes2 sites about doing maps. It works the same way.

#9 What I do is scan in my sketch, fill out the areas with rough guesses of shades of white to height then run it through the editor. Finally I run some various filters on it in the terrain editor to give it a natural feel. Can take upwards of 10 hours to get a terrain just right this way, but it really does turn out just like your sketch if done right.

#10 Lucas: What are these plug-ins?

Everyone: How many meters are 256 pixels in the heightmap??!?!!

#11 Blur works good, as does noise.

All you have to do is know how the heightmap is turned into a terrain and what a realistic one could look like. Mainly, that the smoother the color change the better and that no terrain is perfectly even.

Noise allows for a bit of randomization and blur makes sure there's no jagged points where there shouldn't be.

I doubt anyone can make a heightmap that doesn't require some fiddling with inside of Torque, so don't worry if it doesn't look how you want it to when you import it.

#12 Dont see what the problem with using the ingame editor to model the map is.. works fine for me.

Phil.

#13 Simon:
In case you are still wondering, 256 pixels in the heightmap equates to 1.034miles (1664.6177meters) if the mission squaresize is set to 8 (default). Half that if squareSize is 4, double if 16, etc. The elevation increase/decrease between each color step is (height range / the largest color value in the heightmap) in meters.

Visit http://holodeck.st.usm.edu/vrcomputing/vrc_t/tutorials/ for a slightly deeper explanation. Caution - I have not verified this, just regurgitating what I read. Verify as you feel necessary.

DonC.

#14 (surprised): TGE supports heightmaps ??? ;P
Nope, never used them, editing the terrain with the TGE-Editor, works fine for me.

#15 Where can I find a good explanation of how to import grayscale heightmaps into TGE? I found a brief one at the bottom of a tutorial, but its explenation was not helpful at all. It tells you to look for the example/common/editor directory and create a heightScript directory within that and that was all they say. The trouble was there wasn't even an editor directory at that location in the first place.

Help?

#16 It has been move to creator/terrain_imports.

#17 Height maps must be 256x256, each pixel represents 256 square inches.
You import heightmaps into Torque by pressing F11 in a mission creator enabled game, then going to Terrain Terraformer, then selecting Bitmaps from the Operation listbox.