Game Development Community

TerrainBlocks, shaders and cliff stratification

by Stephen Jr. Pfann · in Artist Corner · 02/25/2009 (8:06 am) · 2 replies

Hi everyone,

Does anybody know if it's possible to apply shaders (or at the very least bump/normal maps) to TerrainBlocks. I am trying to create the stratified look of rock layers in cliffs and thought that a custom shader might best do the job. I've searched the forums and experimented with torque but have not managed to find anything.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Steve Jr.
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Artist Corner


Associate Michael Hall
Distracted...
#1
02/25/2009 (9:41 am)
There have been occasional hints of various people attempting that very thing, but very little results. I do remember that someone had normal maps (even specular) working on an earlier version of Atlas but I can't find that thread now.

You're trying to avoid the texture stretching for vertical or near-vertical terrain areas aren't you? Have you tried using multiple terrain blocks and rotating them in order to create cliffs? Someone was just showing off that idea not too long ago in a blog and had some screenshots of this in practice, and of using two terrains (one inverted) to create caves.

Torque 3D Owner Stephen Jr. Pfann
#2
02/26/2009 (1:28 am)
I remember seeing the blog with bump and specular maps in Atlas. I would consider using Atlas, however I'm not sure if there are any tools that can generate Atlas terrain on the mac (which is the platform I'm working on), and I also thought that I heard that Atlas was going to be phased out of T3D, which makes me concerned about investing time and effort into.

The use of TerrainBlocks as cliffs, as shown in the blog you pointed me too, looks very nice. However the cliffs I need to make often make complete u-turns in their horizontal path. While rotated TerrainBlocks can handle many curves nicely, cliff faces that fold completely back towards the direction they came are a little beyond their abilities. I could make the cliff faces out of a number of TerrainBlocks to deal with this problem, but the frequency of such extreme turns would mean I would have to use a lot of TerrainBlocks and that makes me worried about performance issues. I may still experiment with this technique though.

Thanks for the advice.