Textures and terrains in ET

(Danyboy) #1

Am planning a map for ET and am wondering if ET uses any massive terain blocks like that in the mp_beach tester map.

Or was it just a case of making millions of triangles, modyfing vertices and applying the same texture to them.

TV Forum

(system) #2

Walk around with r_showtris in the map and you can see the size of the triangles. :slight_smile:

As far as Sock mentioned in the forum, the used standard Terrain Editing but with an additional gtk-plugin from their SDradiant.
But if you use Easygen you can help yourslf out until the Tools arrive. :wink:

(hummer) #3

Where was this thread? I was about to ask…

What is the betst way to edit terrain? Typically, I’ll make a height map in Photoshop, bring it into Easgen, export the terrain, bring into Radiant.

But, if I need to make a change, I end up making the change to the heightmap, re-exporting, and re-importing to Radiant.

Now, from my expierence, vertex editing on terrain has been touchy… but the last time I did real terrain editing was under 1.2.1, a while ago.

So, is this the best way to edit terrain right now, or will better things come when the ET kit is released? Perhaps some terrain gurus can enlighten us :slight_smile:

(Danyboy) #4

I already have walk with showtris on but its not a great guide to show whether its a terrain wizard or the trinagle duplication.
Even in mp_beach you cant tell by looking at showtris - you only know from seeing the terrain shader in GTKRadiant.

–

the way i make terrains is by making a brush - changing it to 3 sided (so that the problem with splitting faces doesnt bug your map) then move the vertices of the triangles so they meet each other - put enough together and you can make cliffs, hills and ditches - just takes time.

CM185T

(sock) #5

The terrain triangles in Fueldump are 256x256 map units big. With extremely large open plan maps you don’t have the luxury of having fine detail terrain to work with. The original terrain was taken from the RTCW SP map forest, which was created from a height map. I then cut the terrain up into 2 halves and trimmed all the excessive triangles from the edges. Finally pulled and tweaked the terrain manually in GTKRadiant.

The GTK editor has a cool paint selection tool and will move several vertex points together well. Just remember to select all the terrain first and snap all the points to the grid first. (CTRL-G) Trust me, it will save you loads of grief/time later on. Height map generated terrain can produce vertex points with very strange co-ordinates.

The worst problem with large terrain triangles is that by default they are arranged into a star configuration. (All the triangle pieces point into each other, cant think of better way of describing it) Luckly djbob (after much arm bending) wrote a cool terrain triangle flip plugin which takes two triangles and rotates them 90 degrees. Manually doing this was a complete waste of time and energy, because sometimes it looked/felt worse. (GTK does not have a very good undo feature with regards to terrains)

Something I discovered late on with the new terrain system is that you can mix different triangle sized in one terrain. The side road which goes up to the tank bay did not look right with big 256 sized triangles so I cut the hillside up into 128 triangles so that the road “looked” smoother and more natural. It certainly helped with the road decal, fitting better onto the terrain triangles. If I had known about this earlier on, the terrain would have been tweaked more. Ydnar also did alot of fixes to the way the terrain is mapped and blended in the sdmap2 compiler so that you can do more funky stuff and not be punished for it with dodgy looking alpha blends.

Overall a height map is a very good starting point for large terrains, but at the end of the day, manual tweaking will always add that extra touch in my book. The extra time and effort of smoothing out hillsides and twisting/flipping around certain triangles to get better blending helps.

Sock
:moo:

(Milbo) #6

I have 3 terrains in my map generated with Easygen,… then I opened a clean map and LOADed my terrain into the map,… that is better than to start direct because on this way the textures are saved not in the worldspawn entity (remember the 2048 limit),… there is only a “link” to your script (normally generated by Easygen automatically). So u can use more textures in your terrain,…Then I made some failure (wanted to take another textures),… so I deleted it and generate the terrain new and loaded it into the map again,…
Later i found out that it seems to be enough to change only the shader and the pcx file,… nothing more,… compiled my map mit q3map2 and that was it, the new terrain was in the map hehe.
Probably there are many failures in the map and i dont now it,… I hope that socks write a comment to this procedure.

How do i split extra triangles in the terrain?? I noticed that at the fueldump, I was wondering about the nice street and the rough Trisize around,…
I have my triangles how du u split them??

(Danyboy) #7

Cheers for input Sock - am also wondering

Is there a way to blend textures together - so lets say i’ve got dark cliffs meeting flat grass land - anyway to reduce the join of these two sections of terrain.

Or would it just be adding fern models like the millions used in Radar as a way to hide the join?

BTW - in radar some parts of the map - near the side entrance gimme ultra low FPSs - though i have got a temporary (i hope) Radeon 7500 :frowning:

buy vaporgenie

(sock) #8

Easygen is ok but it does not cope with the latest metashader changes and cannot work with variable sized terrain triangles. It does have triangle edge turning and the import/export of map files is extremely useful. :smiley:

Danyboy: The blending of textures is generally done by the metashader. But if you have two extreme textures the metashader will not perform miracles. You will probably need another texture for in between the two original textures.

Sock
:moo:

(Danyboy) #9

ok cheers

BMW K75

(Danyboy) #10

just thought i’d add this as a demo of the 256 trinagles with smaller road trinagles

ZZR600

(hummer) #11

Wow… great response Sock. I’m working on terrain now, so this is very useful.

Is this triangle flipping plug going to be available with the ET mapping kit? I could use that about now :slight_smile:

Also, great sreenshot. That illustrates the concept perfectly.

Let me ask you, did you include the road texture in the meta shader? I thought the road was decal to be honest, but it doesn’t appear to be from that screen.

How did you get the road to curve like that… match up each texture on the triangle so well?

(chavo_one) #12

It is a decal. If you look closely you can see the terrain triangles underneath the patch triangles of the road.

(hummer) #13

Ah… I see it now. The only cut up triangle terrain block is in the center & right, the rest are decals.

So the curve effect is done with a patch mesh then? I can’t see how it would curve so nicely any other way.

(sock) #14

Got sample images to help with the terrain questions.

The first image is with the road decal in place and terrain triangles highlighted with triscolor. Used (r_showtris 1, r_lightmap 1, r_triscolor “0.0 0.0 0.1 1.0”)

The real trick with the road decal is the shader. It uses an unusual blend and the texture has been changed to work with the blend better. The blend helps to reduce zfighting on bullets and grenade explosions, plus its vertex lit. The decals are a combination of meshes and brushes, depending on if a curved image was needed or not.

The next image shows the decal removed with the (r_nocurves 1) command and shows the terrain triangles below easier. This image shows the triangle edge turning and how it helped with the blending.

The terrain triangle turning plugin will be with the released ET tools. It only works on 2 triangles at a time and they must have all their vertex points on the grid. (ctrl-g)

Sock
:moo:
EDIT: r_triscolor was wrong.

(Danyboy) #15

sounds good - looks complicated - and you have a nicer gfx card than mine :frowning:

also - are there many ppl who don’t use grid lock on their maps? :???:

Just that trying to get anything to meet must be a nightmare and a half!

vapir air one vaporizer

(sock) #16

Yes some people do work off grid and even create whole maps with no grid lock on! (strange but true) If you create a terrain mesh with a height map, I would recommend that when you do bring the terrain back into GTK just select the terrain and press (CTRL-G). Better to be safe than sorry, it could cause problems later on.

Sock
:moo:

(Prophesy) #17

Sock >>

Did I get this right?
For ET terrian creation you recommend us not to use EasyGen since it does not cope with the latest metashader changes, but instead use the tools within GTKRadiant?

Suddenly feeling very confused again :???:
Will EasyGen work with ET all?

(hummer) #18

Cool! I’m learning all kinds of new editing commands too :slight_smile:

Anyway, in http://www.hummerdesign.com/misc/1.jpg this picture, the highlighted triangle is one you’ve cut manually? I just want to make sure. Also, the reason for this, is so the decals will fit better on the terrain?

I’m actually going to be doing something similar here in a bit.

http://www.hummerdesign.com/et/

This top entry shows what I’m working on now… not as cool as your terrain, but it’s coming along. I’ll have a road that enters and exits the map. Right now, I just have a gravel shader applied, but I’d like to do tracks ala Fuel Dump.

(sock) #19

Terrain generated by Easygen will work in ET. You can use whatever tools you are comfortable with. But we do not support easygen so you will have to speak to others about possible problems.

ET supports a new structure for the metashader which makes editing of the shaders easier. It would advantageous to use this new format instead of the original metashader format.

Sock
:moo:

(sock) #20

No that was done by the compiler. The sets of triangles above and to the right where manual created a different size to the other triangles. I simply took an existing set of 2 triangles and create 4 instead. I would only recommend sub-dividing triangles so the dimensions are multiples of 2. Like 256 as the main tile size and sub-divided sections are 128.

The road tracks in Fueldump are detail brushes laid flat against the terrain triangles. I used meshes so that the road tracks can curve. Was planning on foot prints and other stuff but run out of time. :frowning:

Sock
:moo: