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Bug: 24bit grayscale heightmap support

by Alan James · in Torque 3D Professional · 05/05/2009 (4:05 pm) · 2 replies

Previous Torque flavors (i.e. TGE & TGEA) would allow the use of 24bit grayscale images for terrains, T3D is limited to 16bit, which is a bit of a challenge, to say the least, if not impossible to produce with most graphics apps. (The Gimp, Photoshop - at least version 7, Paint Shop Pro 7).

Fix: enable, add, etc. more common 24bit grayscale support.
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Torque 3D Owner Kenneth Holst
Default Studio Name
#1
05/11/2009 (5:05 pm)
Logged as THREED-444

Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#2
07/02/2009 (3:00 am)
Oh... forgot to update this.

So as of beta3 you can now import...

- 32/24bit multichannel image.
- 16bit single channel PNG.
- 8bit single channel PNG.

With any multichannel image we only read the first/red channel.

This should now be the same behavior as TGEA and makes importing easier, but it comes at a price.

8bit heightmaps are horrible looking... no professional would use them. What TGEA did was under the hood it would smooth the 8bit heightmap to make it look good.

In T3D we do not smooth on import, but we did add a 'Smooth Heightmap' option in the 'Terrain' menu bar when in the terrain editor.

One or two smoothing passes is usually enough to fix up a bad looking 8bit heightmap.

Please leave me some feedback here if you have any more troubles with this.