Dark Terrain

#1 What does your TerrainMaterial definition look like? Especially the detail settings. From the screenshot it looks like either the detailStrength is too high, the brightness of the detail texture needs lowering, or you're using a diffuse texture as the detail which can over-amplify in certain combinations. What happens when you modify the detailDistance?

#2 Using a diffuse texture as the detail doesn't produce this effect all the time. I do it a lot and don't get this. I believe I'd get this if I used a .dds detail with a .png diffuse, but I can't quite remember. And I'm fairly certain that increasing the brightness of the detail texture merely whites it out. Well, it whites out the light parts. However, if you use a diffuse texture (that is fairly dark) as the detail, that detail will definately darken the detail area. Never had it go black though. Quite the conundrum.

#3 The file format I'm using is .dds from the gg zombie grave art pack and it definitely seems something weird is going on with the detail. I've tried messing with the settings and I've noticed that the larger the distance number the more black it appears. So after about 3-5 distance it gets ugly and that seems really strange because I would imagine even a distance of 100 would still be in the scope. I'm going to try making a test texture and see if it loads that fine and if it does then I'm going to assume that the art pack has something wrong with it. If not then I'm at a loss..

#4 Ok it was definitely the art pack not working. Custom texture is working like a charm. Thanks for your suggestions, case closed.

#5 Distance of 3 - 5? Seriously? I use 500 as my default. 3 to 5 is your own player's shadow. The only time I don't do this is when my textures obviously tile. Then I either increase the size of the detail texture (lowering the effective resolution) or reduce the view distance. At the very least you should have a distance of 50 in my opinion.

Edit: Also, there is no chance the pack has any errors with it. Garage Games take every measure to ensure that these packs work perfectly. And in my experience, they do. The only time something goes wrong it's because I did something wrong, or failed to do something right.

#6 What would you suggest I do then? I've spent hours trying to get their ground textures to work and I've even tried it on other versions of T3D and the result is the same. If there is something I'm doing wrong I definitely want to correct it.

#7

Quote:
I'm using is .dds from the gg zombie grave art pack

As far as I am aware, the GG_Graveyard doesn't come with terrain textures.

Check out the documentation on Terrain Painter. Detail textures should almost always be greyscale. Midgrey (128) is totally transparent, lower is darker, higher is lighter. You can use detail textures with very subtle colours for variation but anything strong will amplify the diffuse texutre incredibly.

#8 thats the detail strength setting being way too high i think