Game Development Community

Atlas blended texture repeat (UV?)

by Tobias Niva · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 04/07/2008 (12:28 pm) · 6 replies

I started to fiddle with atlas once again - this time trying to make some smaller terrains to use as vertical rockwalls and such.

I've exported a blended terrain from L3DT and after some tweaks with the parameters I'm quite satsfied. The only thing I can't seem to "modify" is the amount of repetition of the tiles portioned out accordning to the 4 alpha's.
I can be totally wrong, but I have a vague memory of someone discussing this and said something about a shader...

My *.hlsl skills are not that great...so where and how do I control have many times the tiles repeat over my blended atlas?

#1
04/07/2008 (4:57 pm)
Check out the post I made about 8 textures on atlas, and you'll see that in my last update, I put in that ability but it is a number change ala trial an error for sizes at the moment, but now that TGEA 1.7 is done I'm at work this week in fact porting all that over, and then using the GUI builder to give things buttons instead of having to go into the atlas.h file every time;)
#2
04/07/2008 (11:53 pm)
Great Bobby! I'll check that out.
#3
04/10/2008 (3:20 am)
Hi Tobias,

If you're using the 'new' plugin for export the blended terrain, you can adjust the repetition rate by changing the 'virt. tex. res.' (virtual texture resolution) value. A higher value will give a more detailed-looking texture, but with more repetition, and conversely a smaller value will give you a texture with less repetition, but it will look less detailed. A word of warning though: this value changes the texture clipmap size, which may have some impact on performance (I'm not quite sure myself, but an Atlas expert may be able to advise on this.)

Probably a better way to avoid repetition is to use climates/materials with larger, less repetitive base texture images. I'll see if I can cook-up some 'blended terrain friendly' climates/materials sometime in the next week.

Best regards,
Aaron.
#4
04/10/2008 (3:58 am)
Thanx Aaron!

I just noticed that the Virtual Texture Resolution actually is beeing taken in account for...'cause earlier I didn't get it to do anything as I could see (earlier L3DT-exporter AND console-command-style).

Thanx anyhow.

PS. Maybe not for this post/issue...but I have some problems exporting blended terrain which I made from an imported Terragen-heightfield (both *.raw and *.ter format). Everthing seems fine and works as if I made the heightfield from within L3DT...but the exported *.atlas kills Torque when I try to run a mission with it. Searched the L3DT-forum but didn't find any answers... *hmm*
#5
04/10/2008 (6:12 am)
Hi Tobias,

My guess would be that the Terragen terrain has too much high-frequency noise for efficient geometry LOD in Atlas. To smooth the terrain in L3DT, use the 'operations->heightfield->smooth (gradient)' function.

Cheerio,
Aaron.
#6
04/10/2008 (6:16 am)
Cheers!

Will try that later...