Terrain shader on model... is it possible ?

(Hewster) #1

Hi,

I’ve been playing with creating terrains from .ase models…
All is wicked, and I’m really really happy with my results, however,
Is there a way to apply terrain shaders to models ?

I have tried making the misc_model a func_group, but this is not
allowed in radiant… I have also tried setting terrain keys to the
misc_model entity, still no joy…:frowning:

Is this just impossible?
or am I missing somthing ?

Cheers

Hewster

(ydnar) #2

'fraid it’s not currently possible to do terrain texturing on anything but brush faces and patches.

You can do decent 2-layer terrain by using q3map_alphaMod dotproduct ( Xvec Yvec Zvec ), however.

The vector specified is a directional angle, off which deviation causes a reduction in alpha value. So if you use a value of 0 0 1 (up), then any vertex normals that point more than 90 degrees off up (left, right, down, etc) will have alpha values of 0.

When used in conjunction with a shader similar to a terrain blend shader, with 2 stages, the second one using alphaGen vertex, then you can have nice blended terrain based on the direction the surfaces face.

y

(Hewster) #3

ok,

Thankyou for spending the time to describe an alternative method,
I will have a play, and see what I can come up with :slight_smile:

Quote : "'fraid it’s not currently possible to do terrain texturing… "…
Is this somthing that is on the q3map2 to-do list ?
np if not… I suspect that using the q3map_alphaMod dotproduct, will give
me the all the functionality I need… but its hard to convince peeps how
great using a model as terrain is, when they cannot apply their terrain
shader skills to them.

For anyone else thinking of using a model as their terrain…
I converted a normal terrain into a model (from the bsp), optimized it, and
made it look better with 70% less polys !! now that’s progress :smiley:

Cheers,

Hewster