More texture in TGEA Mega Terrain

#1 You can easily change a couple of numbers in a script, and add in the extra tools and have 8 paint-able textures with the mega-terrain without making engine modifications...look in the gui...scripts....editor scripts, I will look if you cannot find it, its not that hard once you find it, it is just changing the variable from handling 8 instead of 6...they usually use 'i' for the variable:)

#2 Hi Bobby,

Thank you for your reply.

I was thinking of adding more than 8 texture, say 12 or 15. I assumed that adding 8 texture would be simple (Only changing in the script). Can you point out how we can add more than 8 texture?

I saw some thread that tried to add 15 texture in TGE. Did anyonw try to add 15 texture in Mega terrain?

Regards,

#3 If memory serves me correctly, adding more than 8 paintable terrain textures requires C++ engine changes. Also, I seem to remember that some problems were introduced (in old TGE) with too many textures. In TGE, I was getting strange black blocky areas on my landscapes if I wasn't careful how I painted everything.

#4 Thank you Aaron.

I assumed there must be some kind of technical limitation that we would face trying to add more texture.
My Art team demanded more texture to paint street in the terrain.

I tried to find some decent way to paint street in the terrain but I could not find any.
Could anyone suggest me a resource or pointer, what would be the best way to paint street or create street in a torque level? Is there any decent method that commercial game should follow?

Regards,

#5 U should take a look at Decals ...

While Terrain materials are limited in numbers (and not realy suited for terrains.
Decals have some neat properties that make them ideal for roads.

* not locked to the vertexes. - while terrain material based roads would recuire you to have one material for roads traveling the x axis and one for the y axis .. as well as one for each special, like corners, crossings and T-intersections. Decals lets you use a texture map and scale, rotate etc independent of the terrain materials.

If you want a working example of this I would recommend that you test the act of war editor (not related to Torque). Though implementing this in Torque would at present recuire R&D.

* limited only by the memory of the client. The decals are essentially datablocks and would work on any surface that supports decals. - though for the sake of what they will be used for a filtering system might be recuired so that road materials aren't painted on top of buildings (wouldn't look good on vertical walls etc).

#6 Adding multiple terrain textures to TGE was actually fairly simple this is the resource in which you edit the GUI to support all 8 textures Torque was made for, not 6. Look through the comments for a post by Trenton Shaffer near the top. It's only changing 1 line of code and seems to work very well in TGE. I would try that with Mega-Terrains to see if it's still that similar before doing anything more complex.

#7 8 terrain material would still not be enoguh in order to use it for enbedded roads. you would need one material for each type of road segment with gras, patched, rock, sand etc. ... just to make a simple straight road would need 3 materials (and then I'm only counting grass, patched and sand).

#8 What about DTS road segments? Wouldn't they work?

#9 Would be hard to make them fuse without having any artefacts and glitches showing.

and exporting the entire road network as a single DTS object would make it pritty static ... hard to add new areas, and would be alot to compile at the same time for the game engine... so not realy an optimal solution.

#10 I've had good results with polysoup collision-enabled DTS shapes for roads. They can't be dynamically 'sculpted' in the world editor, but with proper planning and design, duplicated segments can be made to fit most situations.

If you take this 'Hotwheels' approach, remember that speedbumps and other real-world road features can be used in game to disguise virtual world road section seams.

Whenever I need roads, I use RoadMaker to help build fairly believable road beds onto my terrain height maps. Then I build my DTS shapes to follow the path. Gray scale height maps to OBJ files and good retopology tools (like 3D-Coat or Silo are a big help here as well. It may sound like a convoluted process, but it's not so bad once you get the hang of it.

#11 Just a note on using DTS for road sections: the model will vanish when it's far side touches the end of visible distance. If you're using a fairly low fog distance this can cause some nasty pop-up/pop-out of models. Obvisouly not such a problem if you have a long draw distance or if you use fairly small model sections for a road.

#12 Thanks Steve for pointing out a very important issue.

Thanks Mikael for mentioning an interesting approach for painting road.

DTS Polysoup may be an approach to building road, but most of the artist would find it too much hassle to align the road with uneven terrain. I think DTS polysoup would be a good approach for building city block in plane terrain. I also got some suggestions in other thread, which suggested to use dif to build small city blocks and attach them using snap to edge approach (a Torque resource).

I think I would like to try the decal approach or any kind of projective texturing approach. I would also like to get your suggestion, if you think there is any limitation using this approach. It might be possible to write a integrated tool for creating road in the Torque editor. I would like to try it.

If I can make some progress, I'll open a new thread and I would like to know your thought around it.

Meanwhile pleas keep posting about your thought.

Thanks.

#13 make your road chunks "thick"...

Like any DTS shape such as a building, you should always give it a nice sized foundation. Then you can smash that foundation into almost any uneven terrain and be good to go.

Same with your road pieces. Make them 2x thicker than they need to be, and mash them into the terrain.