L3DT Geocontrol 2 and terrain normal maps

#1 To be honest, Lukas, I found L3DT to be quite bland in features and results. It used to be awesome. But now it's just a whole lot of meh.

I use World Machine 2 for my heightmaps, and I use my own texturing system/pipeline.


I've been thinking of trying out GeoControl 2 as the results I've seen from it are really mind blowing. Andy Wright's terrains being truly amazing. I don't think L3DT will ever be capable of that.

#2 Well I got to agree with you on that.. I'm gonna stick with L3DT tho.. Because it's free... But if I were to buy a terrain generator i think i would go for GeoControl 2. I downloaded the demo tho and the GC2 -> Torque pipeline seems horrible compared to the seamless transition of L3DT with it's alpha maps, I always loved it for the alphas. Without the alpha maps I think there would be a whole lot of work texturing by hand, but wth you can't get everything for free!
I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't me who were bad with L3DT as I only were able to find old threads which said L3DT and WM and GC2 were all very comparable.

I guess my conclusion would be that L3DT is very good for beginners like me but GeoControl and others is superior when you are creating some serious terrains.

#3

Quote:
I use World Machine 2 for my heightmaps, and I use my own texturing system/pipeline.

dan,
is that pic's terrain from World Machine?
texture and lighting looks beautiful.
t3d's screenshot?

and what texture pipeline u use?

#4 @ahsan - Yes the terrain up there is indeed made using WM2. I used L3DT first to do my basic design. Then I imported that heightmap (2048x2048 no tiling) into WM and spent a few hours manipulating erosion settings, terracing, etc until I was happy with the result.

World Machine uses a gradient to generate a diffuse map that's splattered onto the heightmap in WM. I exported that diffuse map as a .png and flipped it vertically in GIMP. it needs to be flipped because of the way heightmaps and texture maps are 'projected' or seem to be projected differently in T3D. The terrain heightmap projects from below while the diffuse map is projected from above. I'm only guessing that's the case. In any event the diffuse needs to be flipped to work in Torque. Also I only do this with the desert maps because it ends up with that lovely stratafication (horizontal tone and colour changes). Any other terrain type and I use L3DT to texture, and edit that texture in Photoshop until it looks just right.

Hope that was at least partly informative?

Edit: by the way, the lighting in that shot is all thanks to Adam deGrandis' Skybox Art Pack. I didn't feel the need to change anything.

#5 according to my experience,i say those information are time saver.

for my terrain,
i was using geoControl( for terrain generation(height map)).
after that l3dt for it's texturing solution.

but i was in need of more control on terrain(smothing/flat/.....).
t3d's terrain tools is not good enough to work with big area.
that is why i was looking for more control on heightmap generation.
and i found vue for that.so far that was well but not good for beginner.


i will give a try with this pipeline:
GC2->WM2->l3dt.

thanks for all those info.

#6 What I am playing with atm is GC2->T3D.
Using selectors for the texturing.
It has worked pretty well actually, but GC2 seems to give a very rugged terrain when it is imported into T3D and so I have to smooth it 4-5 times to get a proper terrain.

#7 i use L3DT for the terrains that WLE is using atm. Ive looked at GC and WM and just didnt notice the control over the terrain or ease to convert from one program to another that L3DT gave me. As a novice, L3DT has been the best thing ever to me. Granted, once we get a dedicated terrain designer in house this wont be as big an issue.

#8 A few things I want to mention here while I think of it:

1. Don't apply smoothing to your terrains until after you've done most, if not all your manual adjustments. Doing so will over-smooth the terrain in the more horizontal sections of the map, and will make future manual adjustments look a lot worse.

2. Steven Saric's resource might work for you if you want to have a larger brush size than the T3D default (I have not tested this, and it's verified for T3D 1.1 only thus far), allowing for much faster terrain adjustments etc..

3. Dan Keller's resource will improve the smoothing tool beyond that of the default. This does require engine changes, however, so be aware of that.

These should greatly improve the results you get when shaping your terrains.

#9 Actually I found that the uneven terrain is due to the bit depth of the grayscale image from GeoControl2 is set to 8bits while it should be 16 bit. So the solution would be to export it as one of it's 32 bit formats and then convert it to 16 bit that should give a smooth terrain without having to smooth it. Although i haven't made it work yet.

#10 @Lukas

The more I hear about GeoControl, the less it appeals to me. I'll get around to trying it for myself eventually, but for now I'm quite happy with the tools in my current pipeline.

As for the whole point of this thread (normal maps), L3DT uses 2 normal maps. One (Terrain Normals) is used only in the creation of the light map. The other (TN_Tangent) I'm not really sure about. As I don't use the light map, I don't need the normal maps. So I just generate a texture from the imported height map I created in World Machine. Hope that helps somewhat.