How to increase terraine lod?

#1 lol

#2 No, just use the smooth tool.
Increasing the resolution is a very bad idea since it will quadruple your polygons and terrain is already very polygon expensive.

#3 Thanks for answers.
I know that this way very recource expensive, nevertheless I wish to practice with it, but don`t know how to increase a resolution (or lod).

#4 @Awakened the answer to your question is yes, you can increase the resolution, but unfortunately you'd have to reduce the total size of your terrain afaik.
Terrains have a set maximum resolution of 2048 which results in having to make a choice between size and quality.

For example, if you choose to have 1 pixel per meter, you'd get a 2km*2km terrain, if you choose 10 pixels per meter it would be 0.2km*0.2km terrain.

Dan Webb has given some excellent responses to this kind of threads in the past:
How to change the resolution
Explanation of the terrain resolution in T3D

Also @Joshua, please don't respond to threads if you have nothing constructive to say (no offense, but "lol" felt like an unnecessary taunt).

#5 @LukasThanks a lot, your reply is very helpfull, but it is very sad to read about so serious limitation of Torque3D.I need 8196x8196 meters map, so it can be only ugly without any chances.

#6 @Awakened well despair not!
A little background:
Many people have been struggling with that limitation, the limitation was originally because at the time, most old graphic cards didn't support textures over 2048*2048, so it was a decision to keep backwards-compatibility.
Now a couple of year later, the desire to keep compatibility with older graphics cards has shrunk quite a bit, but you'd still only be able to upgrade to 4k*4k textures before you hit that limit again.

Now what most people have been working on is "tiling terrains" so you'd basically create 4 terrains and place them next to each other to form a bigger terrain.
There have been an issue with some black edges around the terrains that have been holding this method back from being a possibility for a long time, however just a few days ago signmotion seems to have made some progress on that issue!

Here is the pullrequest for the black edges.
Here is a pullrequest for extending the terrain editor with a "solder edges" feature that makes sure that the terrains tile nicely.

You might find this pullrequest interesting as well, it lets you have unlimited height on the terrain (currently limited to 2047 afaik).

#7 Lukas thank you one more.
I thought it is possible only with using paging system.

#8 Well, a paging system would definetly help on performance.
Chris Calef has a terrain paging system on his Terrain Master fork, which you could strip out and merge into your own code. Thats purely a performance thing tho.

#9 I don`t need a paging system. I `ve contacted with Signmotion (Andrey Syrokomskiy) already. He shared his expierence a little bit and helped me greatly as and you Lukas.

#10 Great to hear! I wish you the best of luck with your game.

#11 Thank you. All the best to you

#12 That does not look like a problem with the resolution to me.

Looking at your diffuse, i presume you have made a terrain externally with something like world machine or geocontrol. The spikyness on the terrain you posted a picture of looks like you have used a 8bit png format for the heightmap on export. Export from your creation tool in targa and convert that to png

Also the lod's on your terrain can be distanced further out by lowering the 'screen error' option under the terrains sim menu entry. Use that sparingly though, because it rapidly increases your poly's on screen

#13 No, after importing heightmap I`ve applied "smooth the terrain" several times already. And only after that get screenshot.
Thanks for advise, i will try 'screen error' option

#14 no, ignore the smooth terrain option, the problem is the initial heightmap you are making the terrain from, it has a 'grain' effect on it that happens when saving a greyscale heightmap as a 8bit png as it loses the colour tones to correctly blend the image, you need to save it as a 16bit png to keep the correct smoothness.

Fix the initial heightmap that you are creating the terrain from and you wont have any issues with any spikes or oddities.

Also curious, what size is the heightmap, 1024, 2048 ?

Also, as far as the diffuse texture is concerned, i have a resource up that is a 1 liner to change the generation size of the dds to 4096

http://www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/20852

however believe me, you dont 'need' an 8192, the gain is hardly noticable unless you are creating a terrain larger than the floating point accuracy will generally allow without glitches. and the ram usage an 8192 image is immense even on modern graphics cards (Thats 16 times more data than a 2048 texture, per draw call using that texture)

#15 @Andy, what is the reason of ignoring "Smooting terrain" option?

I can't save heightmap as 16-bit, becouse I use SRTM data, it can be exported only in 8-bit. And if it would be so as you say, grain could be treated by smoothing tool, but they don`t

The size of heightmap is 2048x2048.

Thank you for your recource, I will try it then I`ll be able to compile project.

So now I`ll plan split my 8196x8196 m terrain to 4 terraine by 4096x4096 m. I hope it will solve my problem

#16 But you will need a 16-bit heightmap, at least import your 8bit heightmap, smooth it and export as 16-bit.

#17 @Dunion
Ok, not a problem.

#18 gimp can save 16bit, and its free, photoshop does it too but is pricey.

#19 but Microdem can export only 8bit picture

#20 well, convert the basefile to 16bit png and hit it with a gaussian blur at about strength 0.5-1 that should soften it enough to remove the spikyness from the heightmap while preserving the details