Cool terrains that work in Torque...

#1 I dont cleary anderstand what you do whis textures. What do you mean "rendered textures "?

#2 Thats a good technique, a similar one that was a representative of Discreet showed off at the ATI booth during GDC was using a human head, they had a very high poly one, somewhere in the millions of polys, they rendered it out to a normal map then used it as the bump map on the low poly one, the results were pretty staggering.

#3 Matt
"rendered textures " - you mean normal mapping?

Matthew
But is it possible to use normal mapping without shaders. I mean with good perfomance.

#4 Matt
You answered when i typing post :)
Yes thank you, it is realy cool stuff!
Can you post some bigger shots?

#5 High Poly

Medium Poly

Low Poly

Ok, so the low poly count one looks still kind of low. Just remember it's only 1253 polys. I could probably use a 3000 poly model. I just have to delete the bottom part. These were made in Bryce 5.

#6 Terragen can make some pretty photorealistic heightmaps and texture maps :)

#7 I tried this technique before by exporting terrain from max and the only reason I didnt go forward with it is because exported geometry from max doesnt get lightmapped.

Another problem with making terrain as a dts mesh is that if your model is very large, like terrain, and you look away from the center of the model, the mesh will disappear.

edit: spelling

#8 This realy cool looking for some air-sim games and for landskapes that you see from big distance, i think. It can be used without LODs and will get cool looking detailed view.

#9 If your looking to make terrain as a .dif, Nems Terrain Generator is a really good solution. After you export the map from Nem's terrain generator you will need to heavily optimize it in quark though.

I've been able to get very good results from making terrain this way.

heres a link to Nem's Terrain Generator
nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=8

#10 Terrain was something that I worried about for a very long time. I wanted so bad to be able to make neverending terrain with super high quality textures. I even quit touching the engine for a month or so because of this.

Eventually I was like. "I'm a complete idiot. What do I need that for?"

If your trying to make an mmorpg using the Torque Game Engine then maybe you need all of that, but if you've got a team skilled enough to be able to implement the features it takes to run an mmo then terrain probably isnt very high on your list of things to worry about.

The terrain that comes with stock TGE looks really good. This became quite apparent to me after going back and visiting games that I love on all the major consoles. Your always going to have to make compromises but if you let these little speed bumps slow you down you'll never finish your game.

Now, TSE quality terrain in TGE would be awesome but it took the programing gurus at garagegames months to get a system implemented that would work well and be functional. If it were just as simple as exporting terrain from your favorite 3d modelling application then I think we would have gotten Milestone 2 a lot sooner.

#11 Terragen is a great way to generate hightmaps and textures, for TGE or TSE (especially for TSE)