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Terraform editor question

by Arnold Veeman · in Torque Game Engine · 12/24/2003 (8:52 am) · 12 replies

Hello all,

One more newbe in town. This time from holland so sorry for my poor english. I want to ask for help on this thread.

In the Terrain Terraform Edtitor (tte) there is an option to use bitmaps as a heightmap function. When I wanted to load a bitmap, or a png file to do so, I couldn't see in which folder I had to paste the bitmap in.

Where do I have to put my bitmaps in order to load them into the engine as a heightmap?

thanks in advance,

Aerny
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Torque 3D Owner Jackie Hayes
#1
12/24/2003 (9:10 am)
You have to create a new folder and put your height field maps in there:
example: C:\torque\example\common\editor\heightscripts.

Torque Owner Arnold Veeman
#2
12/24/2003 (12:48 pm)
Thank you so much Jackie, it works!!!

greetings,

Aerny

Torque Owner Mitovo
#3
03/25/2004 (8:14 pm)
Hmm.. I'm trying to accomplish the same thing, using a flat bmp with a 128,128,128 as the colors, for a nice medium gray to start with.

I've tried:
BMP 24 and 8 bit and PNG formats and placed it in the same folder setup you recommended to Aerny.. Only for me it's not working at all. All I get is an emtpy file-list window..

What might I be missing?

Thanks..
Mike

Torque Owner Nicolas Quijano
#4
03/25/2004 (8:29 pm)
Grayscale 256 x 256 .png the heightmap has to be :)

Torque Owner Mitovo
#5
03/25/2004 (9:40 pm)
Nicolas,

Thanks! I tried this, though, and it's still not working. The editor will not recognize that I have any bmps in there at all.. no matter what format or color depth I'm saving them as.

Is it possible if someone coudl post a set of instructions of how to properly create a heightmap, what format to save it to, and what format to save it as?

I'm missing something along the line and maybe a step-by-step will help...

Thank you for any assistance!

Mike

Associate Stefan Beffy Moises
#6
03/25/2004 (11:53 pm)
Detailed instructions can be found here
(under "Terrain" obviously ;))

Torque Owner Mitovo
#7
03/26/2004 (3:45 am)
Hmm.. then something is completely messed up with my setup.. I've done exactly everything in that tutorial, several times over, and the editor is not listing anything. Zip.

I've tried several different ways of getting the results, just to make sure I'm not trying the wrong one..

I've tried:
Set the color Mode to Grayscale, 8-Bit then save as PNG
Set the color Mode to RGB, 8-Bit then save as PNG
Set the color Mode to Indexed (which is inherently 8 Bit) and save as Png.

The image is nothing more than a solid 128,128,128 gray texture. I even tried doing a slight "render clouds" mixing a slightly higher gray in with it, just to give the terrain a slight difference in height.

I've double, triple even quadruple checked the paths, with my explorer window open right on top of the tutorial showing where the file goes.. I'm exactly in the right folder setup...

Nothing's working.


What's going on here?

Torque Owner Mitovo
#8
03/26/2004 (3:10 pm)
Hello again..

Okay, I got home and tested something I thought might have been at issue earlier with the heightmap not working. It turns out that everything is in fact set up correctly, and for some reason, I simply cannot get this to work.

So, can anyone shed any additional light on this?

Thanks!
Mike

Torque Owner Erik Madison
#9
03/26/2004 (3:22 pm)
Size must be 256x256. 128 will not work.

Torque Owner Mitovo
#10
03/26/2004 (3:32 pm)
Erik,

Hey there..

Actually, I have the grey value set to 128,128,128. The texture size itself is 256x256...

Thanks for the feedback!

Mike

Torque Owner John Vanderbeck
VanderGames
#11
03/26/2004 (3:43 pm)
Works fine for me. I just did it.

Only thing I Can think of is you don't have the right directory or image format like you think you do. You did restart Torque right?

Torque Owner Mitovo
#12
03/26/2004 (4:18 pm)
Hmm.. Okay, I got it to work finally... Not sure what I did differently.. Only now I have another problem...

No matter how much smoothing I do on the heightmap before saving it, the resulting terrain is always coming out jagged.. I try to apply a "smooth" filter to it, but all that seems to do is increase the height of the terrain.. nothing's being smoothed...

Edit: Nevermind.. I went back and tried again.. I just did the blurring in the wrong order... Blah... I need to slow down on these things :-)

Thanks Again! :-)