Landscape Choices
Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 4:20 pm
We're pondering whether to use a mesh or an heightmap generated landscape. Anyone else had that dilema before?
IMO all mesh can be done in max and exported as a .scene file. Buildings, trees, Land surface, ect...(Doing the most possible steps in max would be great because it cuts down on the compatibility/scaling/timing/cost issues)
I've looked up freeworld3d and eventhough it looks like a decent world editor, lack of instruction whatsoever (Correct me if i'm wrong!) and the fact that you can't scale (1m = 1m) the generated terrain means that you need to scale all the meshes you import and god knows that riggued animations hate being scaled.
Any other not too expansive world editors worth looking up out there?
On the other hand, using heightmaps, how would we position all our meshes for trees and stuff? Randomly on a "tree bitmap" applied to the landscape? Thats not so great gameplay wise if line of sight, cover and space occupations are concepts in your game. What about buildings? I understand its faster to render....
Also ive seen some fancy shaders to splatter textures unto landscapes, but for the art guy, what's to be done? Diffuse textures, Heightmap to rule where grass finishes and rock starts, alpha maps for roads....yea?
Oh! yea any reference material/tutorials would be great!
Well that's a start!
IMO all mesh can be done in max and exported as a .scene file. Buildings, trees, Land surface, ect...(Doing the most possible steps in max would be great because it cuts down on the compatibility/scaling/timing/cost issues)
I've looked up freeworld3d and eventhough it looks like a decent world editor, lack of instruction whatsoever (Correct me if i'm wrong!) and the fact that you can't scale (1m = 1m) the generated terrain means that you need to scale all the meshes you import and god knows that riggued animations hate being scaled.
Any other not too expansive world editors worth looking up out there?
On the other hand, using heightmaps, how would we position all our meshes for trees and stuff? Randomly on a "tree bitmap" applied to the landscape? Thats not so great gameplay wise if line of sight, cover and space occupations are concepts in your game. What about buildings? I understand its faster to render....
Also ive seen some fancy shaders to splatter textures unto landscapes, but for the art guy, what's to be done? Diffuse textures, Heightmap to rule where grass finishes and rock starts, alpha maps for roads....yea?
Oh! yea any reference material/tutorials would be great!
Well that's a start!
