Terrain Detail texture problems...
by Andy Wright · in Torque 3D Beginner · 07/24/2010 (4:53 pm) · 28 replies
Hey all,
Been playing around with the t3d demo a little, and ive come across a problem with a terrain ive made from a 1024x1024 heightmap, it has a single 4096x4096 texture covering the whole zone, and on a separate layer ive started detailing area's that i want grassed over with the standard grass1 texture, and relevant detail map, however its only showing on certain plane's and have no idea what ive done wrong here lol... anyway heres a pic, if anyone has any suggestions on what ive possible done wrong, any help would be appreciated. also let me know if theres anything else you would like to know about the zone settings etc.
as you can see, theres a distinct line where the terrain section has the detail texture working, and the section next to it, with the same grass texture, painted at the same time doesent have it showing...
help :(
[Edit] oh and a side question, does terrain tiling not work in t3d, like it did in tge/tgea ? :|
Been playing around with the t3d demo a little, and ive come across a problem with a terrain ive made from a 1024x1024 heightmap, it has a single 4096x4096 texture covering the whole zone, and on a separate layer ive started detailing area's that i want grassed over with the standard grass1 texture, and relevant detail map, however its only showing on certain plane's and have no idea what ive done wrong here lol... anyway heres a pic, if anyone has any suggestions on what ive possible done wrong, any help would be appreciated. also let me know if theres anything else you would like to know about the zone settings etc.
as you can see, theres a distinct line where the terrain section has the detail texture working, and the section next to it, with the same grass texture, painted at the same time doesent have it showing...
help :(
[Edit] oh and a side question, does terrain tiling not work in t3d, like it did in tge/tgea ? :|
About the author
#22
My primary concern for T3D game art content is a balance between good quality and small memory footprint. And being I built this terrain texture set for my own Torque projects, it will end up being what it is.
Because of compression artifacting and my loathing of graphical artifacts, right now the 'neo' terrain texture set is using DXT5nm; one for normal, and one for parallax. I have found an exhilarating freedom in the ability to mix and match for an endless variety of realistic looking final outcome. The price of being able to paint down a massive number of individual terrain textures and yet use very little video RAM and still look great, is the exclusion of combining anything into the alpha channel (on account of 'swizzling'), and the total disregard of .png formate(on account of GPU speed and video ram).
07/28/2010 (12:30 pm)
Oddly that is one of the bugs I have with T3D, normal and parallax mapping oddity with the .DDS formate. It have been a slowly evolving (for the better) bug as the T3D builds trickle out into the wild, and some forum posts about them seem to point in a promising direction for such bugs to have finally been fixed for good. My primary concern for T3D game art content is a balance between good quality and small memory footprint. And being I built this terrain texture set for my own Torque projects, it will end up being what it is.
Because of compression artifacting and my loathing of graphical artifacts, right now the 'neo' terrain texture set is using DXT5nm; one for normal, and one for parallax. I have found an exhilarating freedom in the ability to mix and match for an endless variety of realistic looking final outcome. The price of being able to paint down a massive number of individual terrain textures and yet use very little video RAM and still look great, is the exclusion of combining anything into the alpha channel (on account of 'swizzling'), and the total disregard of .png formate(on account of GPU speed and video ram).
#23
nearly every time dds's come up with artifacts allover the show once saved. not so much an issue with torque, i think its something more likely to do with the save process of nvidia's dds tools through photoshop.
07/28/2010 (8:01 pm)
If i remember right i had issues with using dds's for the normals and went back to png's.nearly every time dds's come up with artifacts allover the show once saved. not so much an issue with torque, i think its something more likely to do with the save process of nvidia's dds tools through photoshop.
#24
T3D have had a string of bugs with .dds and terrain, not all of what relate to artifacting. Bugs that should have been fixed very early on. I know most T3D projects just worked around them, and when they start to consider 'why' their beautiful game is running like crap, they will probably never consider the fact they used over a gig worth of PNG's to be a factor in questionable render chugging. T3D use a massive amount of video RAM, I have test case scenario that plug the RAM up as illustration of how ugly it can get, and the symptoms often do not immediately lead one to think of video RAM to be the cause.
DDS can be skillfully used without visual artifacting.
07/28/2010 (8:42 pm)
I dont use Photoshop dds tools, results are too 2 dimensional.. (har)T3D have had a string of bugs with .dds and terrain, not all of what relate to artifacting. Bugs that should have been fixed very early on. I know most T3D projects just worked around them, and when they start to consider 'why' their beautiful game is running like crap, they will probably never consider the fact they used over a gig worth of PNG's to be a factor in questionable render chugging. T3D use a massive amount of video RAM, I have test case scenario that plug the RAM up as illustration of how ugly it can get, and the symptoms often do not immediately lead one to think of video RAM to be the cause.
DDS can be skillfully used without visual artifacting.
#25
I have been playing around with terrains and I am a total novice at it, so advice from you experts would be appreciated.
07/29/2010 (6:42 am)
Would you guys mind sharing some of your techniques on terrain texturing? namely how you create your textures, maybe some photoshop techniques, how you apply them in T3D etc? I have been playing around with terrains and I am a total novice at it, so advice from you experts would be appreciated.
#26
after much arsing around with file formats, and giving up on dds for 16bit greyscale without banding, and going with the superpng exporter for photoshop, got my heightmaps coming in perfectly. yay! no more steps to smoth out from banding :D
decided to push the sizes with stuff aswell, making details smaller on a 2048 map, importing them at 8 meters to 1 unit for a desert test, 16km square terrain. shame about the floating point issues lol :D
hm again a desert map doesent 'look like much' im an image :/ but to put the size into perspective, thats about 17 minutes for gideon to run one edge length lol, and its tileable on the 0point by rotating 90 and pivoting on the 0 axis. reduces the chance of noticably repeating terrain then if running in one direction a long time.
i think i might be going a bit overkill with these kinda terrain sizes lol
08/03/2010 (10:17 pm)
Rightyho,after much arsing around with file formats, and giving up on dds for 16bit greyscale without banding, and going with the superpng exporter for photoshop, got my heightmaps coming in perfectly. yay! no more steps to smoth out from banding :D
decided to push the sizes with stuff aswell, making details smaller on a 2048 map, importing them at 8 meters to 1 unit for a desert test, 16km square terrain. shame about the floating point issues lol :D
hm again a desert map doesent 'look like much' im an image :/ but to put the size into perspective, thats about 17 minutes for gideon to run one edge length lol, and its tileable on the 0point by rotating 90 and pivoting on the 0 axis. reduces the chance of noticably repeating terrain then if running in one direction a long time.
i think i might be going a bit overkill with these kinda terrain sizes lol
#27
Because of time and future limitations to my internet bandwidth I will probably not be able to kick my T3D terrain texture set version TWO out the door this year after all.
@Andy, you do not need to worry about compression of the hightmap image file, it is not resident in RAM after conversion to terrain mesh.
@Donald Teal: Sorry I had lost this thread and was hopeful to return to it once it was bumped. Ill try and compile some hints to consider sometime in the next 24 hours.
08/03/2010 (11:01 pm)
I had lost this thread....Because of time and future limitations to my internet bandwidth I will probably not be able to kick my T3D terrain texture set version TWO out the door this year after all.
@Andy, you do not need to worry about compression of the hightmap image file, it is not resident in RAM after conversion to terrain mesh.
@Donald Teal: Sorry I had lost this thread and was hopeful to return to it once it was bumped. Ill try and compile some hints to consider sometime in the next 24 hours.
#28
08/03/2010 (11:59 pm)
im not worried about the image size, its when it loses the colour details and gives a blatant banding where it reduces the bitrate, causes allsorts of headaches importing the map when it has a load of steps in it caused by the slight colour differences. the best image quality output file from gc is a 16 bit tif, which i cant use use straight into torque, had to get it over to png, which cause headaches at first because i was on the old superpng with working alpha's... but only seemed to save at 8bit, had to replace with the newer superpng that kept the 16bit info that kept the smoothness of the original image 
Torque 3D Owner Andy Wright
BrokeAss Games
using the displacement in the alpha channel for the normal map png works good for normals and the parallax settings.