Ogre Forums

Yeah, just pimping my new tutorial series here.
I started out with quite a simple tutorial on how to use Max to generate heightmaps for use with the Ogre engine.

I'll continue this series of Tutorials as I find time. My summer vacation is soon going to end and I'll have little time after that, so hopefully I'll be able to write up the second issue before that.

I plan this Tutorial Series to generally take the user through generating a fully working Environment, starting out with a simple heightmap, textures for the Terrain, and going on creating simple meshes and textures to fill the environment, and then in the end going as far as creating a character, unwrapping, texturing, rigging, animating and exporting it.
I hope for people to learn to use the Max environment as they continue reading and following the tutorial step by step. I want to encourage programmers who happen to have access to max to use these to create their own content.

Anyway. Enough talk, here's the link:

http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/3dsmax_Heightmaps

Hope you'll find it useful. Feedback is very much appreciated, so I can improve on the next issues. (So I learn something as well.. hehe)

Wow, that is incredible!
I'm not an artist myself, but my main modeller has been asking about heightmaps, and that is EXACTLY what I've been looking for. I have very limited 3ds experience, but that really does look great.
I'm sure your next installment will be equally excellent

Glad it helped.
I thought some people might be struggling with heightmaps since it's not in any way intuitive or obvious how you can do them...

Great tutorial except last part is not precise enough for heightmap.Direct rendering to screen result is often fake because of default light and other things thant can change result a little .To get 100% accurate output you should use render to texture option.More info you can find in this post
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12497

Yeap, and we need add some step at the end...set channel ID for UV..choose UV to render to texture...and..finish
another reason for render to texture is if there are alot of stuff on terrain..It will take time to hide all object and render top view..

hm...
frankly, I don't think that's correct.
I'm effectively removing the plane from any other light influence by upping it's "self-illumination" to 100.

The render to texture is of course the cleaner method, but I think it's quite complicated compared to a simple render.
And if I really want it precise, then I'll use texporter, as described in the box right at the bottom, which is just much simpler and more precise even, then a Gradient.

And maxxoros, why would there be stuff on the terrain in max? I never created a terrain, then put stuff on it and *then* generated the heightmap...
I think that's a very specific set of requirements you got there that, again, could be easily done by using texporter.

But thanks for the input guys. If you find any other flaws, tell me.

@KO:
If we create a real world in 3DSMax and then export it to ogre...There will be two part:
1. The terrain
2. Object in scene like building, tree, NPC, ect....
---
We can place everything we want on a mesh that called terrain and use your technique to made heightmap...
The technique with ID UV channel and Render to texture seem complicated...but the fact It made life easier in this situation