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Cliff or overhang?

by Christopher Borger · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 08/14/2007 (3:23 pm) · 4 replies

I'm trying to figure out how to model some cliffs and/or mountain sides with some overhang...

I assume both the terrain engines (legacy/atlas) don't really support this since heightmaps only work on "one axis".

Tried to model my landscape and then make some cliffs and structures out of *.dts shapes (can't really imagine this done in Constructor since BSP has a few "rules" and limitations...).

The problem I ran into, is that *.dts is being fogged in another way than *.dif and terrain - the cliff does not fog at first (darker than surroundings)...and the totally disappears, a bit into the fog).

Is there any one that have done anything similar...or have any creative solutions?!?

/Thanx
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Torque 3D Owner J.C. Smith
#1
08/14/2007 (9:54 pm)
Atlas does support them, but there are no exporter tools that will allow you to import them. What most games today are doing is using terrain and in the areas where you need a sharp cliff they will use place a DIF or DTS shape in that area to give the appearance of a rock face, etc.

Torque 3D Owner Mark Dynna
#2
08/15/2007 (1:46 pm)
Agreed, Atlas is a mesh-based terrain system and theoretically can support those features. However, someone, somewhere, needs to write an importer/exporter for Atlas to something like .3ds or .obj format. That way those kind of features could be modeled in any 3D modeler package.

Torque Owner Christopher Borger
#3
08/16/2007 (4:10 pm)
Ok...but is is much work to get the dts-shapes (if one choose to model overhangs as dts) to fog "properly"? (e.g. as the surrounding terrain/dif:s)...

Torque Owner Ves
#4
08/26/2007 (6:53 pm)
Have you tried scaleing or ratating a 2nd atlas map?? While heightmaps only work on one axis once the terrian is modeled we can do what we want with it (theoretically). Fooling with it on my own I was able to align atlas terrian 90 deg and run across it, however at some point (in my messing with the terrian) the collisions got mucked up and I couldn't even move. I can say for sure that if you scale a peice of atlas terrian at all it will destroy its collison geometry (this may not be entirely true, I am not sure exactly what happens but you basically fall right through the world if you scale it at all).

You should be able to do a really decent cliff by rotating it 90 degrees though.

Ves