Caves

#1 Inverting heightmaps is one way (easy, too - just make another ChunkLOD and position it where you want it, then rotate it upside down). There'll be some new ways with the next rev of Atlas, too. :)

#2 This RL cave is a few miles from my home, just for some eye candy and wishfull thinking
www.naturalbridgecaverns.com

#3 Randy, I have a tutorial somewhere on this site that does a pretty decent job of making a cave/dungeon whatever.
I remember trying out Bens suggestion a long time ago, but IIRC I couldn't get the terrain object to invert.

#4 Hum I could not find it with search. Linkage??

#5 The beginning of our game takes place in a huge cave..
atlas does caves rather nicely.. *please excuse the placeholder art..;)

#6 Looking good. :)

#7 Do tell :)

#8 Looks very nice. Are both halfs of the cave Atlas terrains? The "floor" looks a bit like the legacy terrain...

#9 @Kevin nice cave man that's really good. I can't wait until TSE gets ported to Linux, I have so many great ideas on how I can use it.

@Randy, a search on the word Dungeon reveals this link Creating a Dungeon

It gives a pretty good effect IMHO. Not as nice as the above picture, but you'ld be surprised at how good the human mind is at filling in the blanks. I still find myself ducking everyonce in awhile on my first cave as I get into a place where the terrain narrows and it looks like there is a low ceiling. ;)

#10 @josh - both are atlas

The textures look better from far away.. (might need to play with scale) so im guessing thats why it has that look.

Erik did this using a series of heightmaps drawn up from our concept artists..

#11 The real difficulty I had with the textures, was the fact that the majority of the cave is visible at all times. From my limited understanding of the Atlas paging system, I really need the entire texture to be loaded at all times. So, that sorta prevented me from using a massive texture, which would give it a much more realistic look. This tqt is merely 2048x. If I was to enlarge the cavern more, hide large chunks behind stalactites etc, and therefore make better use of the chunks, I could very well increase the detail tremendously.
Barring that, we're working on expanding the AtlasMaterial shaders to 'fake' a bit more detail.
Also, I may eventually actually grasp the whole atlas system, and therefore know _exactly_ what settings are right for what job.

#12 @Erik:

I don't understand what you're getting at... "'the entire texture"? It always renders some sort of texture on all geometry, and generally attempts not to load lots of detail for far away places. When it's working properly the texture LOD transitions are nearly imperceptible, and it looks like you have full detail on all points of the terrain.

#13 I would pay for a good cave tool. Something that could have some kind of brush that you could pick from a menu of shapes and kinda draw a cave system. (random thoughts)

#14 Anyone know of a tool to make caves? Would you 'import' it into your level editor?

#15 Nem's tools has a great tutorial on making caves and importing the geometry to quark..The tutorial uses
an older version than the current one, but it is easy to follow..
nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=36#p36