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New terrains ?


Hammer

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I have been thinking about adding a new terrain to the editor but :unsure: as its still in max at the moment , are there any limits in size and poly count ? I know in GR it was about 800 x 800 map size and i think about 50,000 polys ? I think .

Can antbody help Please :thumbsup:

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In GR terrain was 400x400 meters. Anything beyond that wasnt visible on command map. 50000 polys was a lot for whole map with all objects back in the days on slow computers.

Dunno how is it with GRAW2 tho...

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Only limit I know about in GRAW2 is 60000 vertices for every part your terrain consist of.

Is that as Tinker suggests or 60,000 total to include any structures, trees, props etc ?

Edited by Hammer
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You can have as many parts you want in your terrain after what I know. The more you break the terrain up, the better the game will run, as the engine renders the whole terrainpart if only 1 poly is actually displayed. The more you break it up, the harder the texturing will be to avoid seams in the terrain.

Edit: 60000 vertices is max for 1 object.

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You can have as many parts you want in your terrain after what I know. The more you break the terrain up, the better the game will run, as the engine renders the whole terrainpart if only 1 poly is actually displayed. The more you break it up, the harder the texturing will be to avoid seams in the terrain.

Edit: 60000 vertices is max for 1 object.

Thanks thats very interesting :thumbsup::yes:

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The more you break the terrain up, the better the game will run, as the engine renders the whole terrainpart if only 1 poly is actually displayed.

It will also make physics calculations against teh ground easier. So there are good things with splitting the landscape up.

Beside the texture edges, lightmapping is hard in split landscapes though. As lightmap resolution is low compared to the tiling textures, you usually get a bad edge where the landscape is split. So take care to figure out where to split the landscape to minimize those. Can't be done until the environment is set so you know which way the shaodws are gonna be cast though.

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The more you break the terrain up, the better the game will run, as the engine renders the whole terrainpart if only 1 poly is actually displayed.

It will also make physics calculations against teh ground easier. So there are good things with splitting the landscape up.

Beside the texture edges, lightmapping is hard in split landscapes though. As lightmap resolution is low compared to the tiling textures, you usually get a bad edge where the landscape is split. So take care to figure out where to split the landscape to minimize those. Can't be done until the environment is set so you know which way the shaodws are gonna be cast though.

:huh:

So, would it make sense to build it as a whole. Texture it, then break it up to manageable part?

:wall:

Now you that you mentioned shadows, how would you do a preview to check if they appear correct?

Edited by -Corax-
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It's no problem to built it up and break it after texturing, but be careful with the vertex painting, as I guess it can turn out weird if you paint vertices in the seam between the different parts.

To check the shadows, you have to import the terrain inside the editor and render the lightmaps.

The problem I think is if you have a mountain, and a seam between two parts of the terrain below it so it cast shadow over the seam. Then the shadow casted from the mountain will stop in the seam, and it's gonna look weird as lightmaps are generated one for each part of the terrain.

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It's no problem to built it up and break it after texturing, but be careful with the vertex painting, as I guess it can turn out weird if you paint vertices in the seam between the different parts.

It's actually to perfer to built it as 1 part and texture it and vertex paint it before splitting it up. That way the textures are correctly aligned over the edges (can't be done with lightmaps) and also the vertex painting should be the same on both sides of the split. :)

On lightmaps. They use UV channel 4. Make sure that nothing overlapps and all of the UV is inside the 0-1 space. Try to use as much of hte UV space as possible, while at the same time trying to have as few edges as possible. Stretching is not a big problem for lightmaps, so deform a bit when needed. Too much deformation will show though.

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