Terrain editor behaviour

#1 Flatten is better used when preparing a small brush-sized area of the terrain for some sort of art that needs a flat area to rest on. Say, a building or landing. Single clicks are good here, gets you a nice flat surface without much issue.

Smooth can be a bit beastly, I use it very carefully, sparingly, and with low values.

Set Height (in 1.1b3) has been greatly improved with the quick-grab value-get (not at home to test, but I think it was alt-click to grab height from a bit of terrain). Perfect for larger areas that need a specific height, just run a little smooth around the edges to avoid extreme stretching. This might be what you're looking for, rather than flatten.

#2 Smothing works off the average from all points within your brush, so in most cases if you are using a big scale brush, it will force down any high points to be closer to the lower points. So with that in mind, use a smaller brush, size 5 or something around there, with its density lower to decrease how 'hard' it smooths the area.

for flattening an area the set height tool sounds much more set for what you describe. in the top right you chose the height unit you want to set, and then wherever you paint the terrain it will be flat at that height, and then smooth out around it to blend it in.

If its the whole terrain you want to smooth there is an option in the terrain menu at the top to do the whole terrain in one go which works pretty good if you have come from an 8bit heightmap and have steps everywhere

#3 Thanks for your quick replies - but:
I still cannot find out how to set/pick/select the height-value for the "set-height-tool". Alt-click isn't it...?

#4 I encountered another issue on the terrain-painter:
There are some rectangular sections of the terrain where the terrain-texture is displayed "not tiled". Need a picture? See here:


Anyone knows what causes this effect?

#5 hm not seen anything like that with my install. Whats your system spec, primarily your graphics card.
Also is that the same terrain layer as the grass to the left of it or is it a different material layer all together that isnt showing up properly

#6 My computer: Intel Core Duo E8500 3GHz 3 GB RAM
XP Pro SP3, NVidia GeForce GTX260 850 MB driver 6.14.12
Torque installed from Torque_3D_2009_SDK_1_0_1_Win.exe

Hi Andy,
this effect happens with multiple of my four terrain-textures;
Yes, the "correct" grass and the blurred are the same layer.
More weird: some of those blurry rects "switch" to correct displaying,
when i paint with anoter texture in the same area.
My first thought was, this is because i have a 1024x1024, not-tiling
base-texture (you see the house-sketch in the upper part).
So i changed to an usual with diffuse and detail, but nothing changes those blurry areas.
I will update my gfx-driver.
Shall i install "Torque-3D-2009_Pro_1.1_Beta_3-Win.exe" ?

#7 I would definately suggest installing the latest version.
There are a hell of alot of bug fixes from 1.0.1 upto 1.1b3

The large diffuse you have on the terrain doesent matter, I use a single 4096x4096 on the majority of my terrains and have upto 10+ layers on a terrain too.

I dont recall seeing this before, however i have experienced this which is similar
http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/120813

Update to 1.1b3, transfer your mission over to the new install, and see how it is then.

Btw, you have some very nice neat models on your site :) good work

#8 Now i have updated to 1.1 beta3, and nothing changed. It's still the same.
I started the level new again, made a correct (detail-)working base-texture, added the "plan-texture" and 2 more with detailing.
Now see what happens: The grass won't show any details, and the more brownish acts real strange:

www.harpersoft.de/Meynis/Torque/TerrainPaint1.wmv

I even tried different video-card-drivers, with no effect.
Please help.

#9 Hmm, im a dozy git when im not paying attention... looking back over this thread, realised i have had exactly the same problem in the first place lol.

Where you are using a whole diffuse map to cover the terrain for your zone design, I presume you do not have a detail map tied to it.
Assign one to it and it should fix this problem. (Set it to have a really low view distance so it doesent effect your view of the terrain map youre using for level design)
http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/118295

#10 Thank you, Andy! Yes, assigning a detail-map was helpful.
Now everything looks fine - now i can go on with my next problem.
Why the materials are not saved after importig a new model....
But this will also have a simple solution, i think.

#11 are you importing from collada or bringing in a DTS ?

#12 Importing Colladas, from DeleD.

#13 You need to make sure you set your texture folder destination with deled#s dae exporter to wherever you want the textures to be within your torque install. easiest options to just keep it as the same folder your exporting the dae to. When I do that with deled, texturing works fine.

#14 Thanks Andy, i realized to go down to the "dirty basics" like controlling the material.cs etc. with an editor. The material-editor doesn't works error-free. Correcting by hand fixes all problems.