Strange looking terrain after import from heightmap

#1 Is your heightmap 8bit? That will usually cause problems.

#2 I wish that was the solution, but no, it is indeed 24 bit png.

#3 24 bit png means 8 bits per channel, and it's a greyscale image. So it is in fact 8 bit.

So you only have 256 height levels, which is really not adequate for most terrains. You can see the problem this causes by making a heightmap which is (0,0,0) on one half, and (1,1,1) on the other, loading it in, and seeing the big ledge that forms.

You want to use 16 bit height data if you want it to look good. PNG can do that, hopefully Torque still imports it correctly. :)

Or import 8bit and smooth it by hand.

#4 A true 16 bit heightmap will fix that up.

You can also use the Smooth Heightmap function in the Terrain menu while in the Editor.

#5 "Or import 8bit and smooth it by hand."

@Norse - You could also follow what Ben said and import by 8bit, and instead of smoothing by hand you can select the menu "Smooth Terrain" option and that will smooth the entire terrain for you, but you may end up having to do this a few times to get it completely smooth to your standards.

Head the warning though, if you smooth the terrain too many times with the "Smooth Terrain" menu option, I've encountered issues where the player will end up getting stuck in a run mode that you can't get out of and it will look like they are sliding on ice and eventually fall through the terrain. Fix this by smoothing certain parts by hand, using the manual smooth terrain tool.

#6 Cool, thanks a lot for the advices, guys.

The "smooth terrain" function helped quite a bit. Will look into 16 bit height data also.

#7 I actually ran into this exact same issue a week or so ago. What app are you using to create the heightmap?

#8 @Ryan: After doing *a lot* of Googling on the matter, and trying different stuff - all which didn't work, I found the program L3DT from Bundysoft. It did the task well!

You can find it on this site => www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/

There's a free version, which has some limitation, but it was good enough for my needs. There's also the professional edition, which has a free 90 day trial.

#9 I've been using Geo Control 2. I ended up having to export a .tiff then converted it to a png. I was baffled for a while, I was converting it in Gimp but that's what was killed the bit depth for me even when I got the export working the way I wanted it to.

#10 @Norse
You can get L3DT here on Garage Games too! www.garagegames.com/products/l3dt $35 for the Pro Version

#11 Nice, thanks for the heads up Travis.