Terrain and Landscape Study for Maratis (Page 1 of 2)

Thanks for the comment, link and contrabution to the topic anael I am definitely going to make use of that link some really great info there.

I am not going to even comment on that screenshot and just keep pretending that I am doing a good job lol

Anyways in my last post I was going to point out some diffculties, the first problem I had was.

    1. I ended up with something completely differant than what I was trying to model.

Notice in these two screenshots where my waterfall spills into the creek and the ordon spring there the same basic shape but mine ended up being a small waterfall and creek.

I could have kept going and turned the following screenshot into a canyon with a rope bridge and had a fairly large terrain.  But that lead me to my next problem.

    2. How to get lots of fine high resolution detail into my texture without it being a 300mb image.

I had to start to back-up off of my terrain to get some distance from me and the view of my terrain in-order to limit the amount of blur and pixelation I was seeing on my terrain texture.  Thats why my large terrain turned into a small one.

The next problem I ran into was that I wasnt in the mind set that this model should be as close to production ready as possible I was just kinda going with it. That lead me to a few problems with my terrain mesh.

    3. Crooked Edges
    4. Polygon Count was to high
    5. Terrain Texture was a 4096x4096 image

These problems caused my terrain to be extremly diffacult to extend and modify and the start of poor performance. Not to mention mobile devices have a Polycount in View, Texture Size and Texture Memory limitations so the scene I had created might not even run on an Iphone or Android device.

Now having an idea of what I wanted to do I set out to fix my terrain mesh by creating a new lower poly and smaller texture resolution version 2048x2048.

The next problem I ran into was that I tend work twords getting my scenes out of blender painted in such a way "Shadows Included" that when they are imported into Maratis they look exctly the same. This works most of the time but one particular case where this wasnt the case was trying to bake the shadows of the leafs/branches/tree onto the terrain texture.

    6. Blender will bake the AO of the shape of the mesh and not the image contained"Leaf"

This left me with square/blocky shadows baked onto my terrain texture under the trees. I was able to fix this problem by just using a spot light in maratis and enbling shadows.

This is the final result in trying to solve some of the problems I had just talked about 1. A new Lower Poly, Cleaner version of my Terrain, 2. Smaller Texture Map, Tree Shadows from a Maratis Spotlight with Shadows enabled.

Last edited by zester (2013-01-17 15:11:14)

Thanks I was looking at this when I started it there is still alot of texture work to do to finish the bridge.

I went through the exactly same problems

To bake shadows of the leafs in blender, you must enable "receive transparent" in the material options

Your scene is really cool !

What do you mean like a 2D cutout like leafs on a tree or like a 3D glass ball?

Cool stuff. I'm working with Wings 3d for my terrains meshes, that way I can control what parts I want to be detailed a bit better. Also, when I'm exporting from my csg modeler, I'm importing it into wings3d and creating a single texture . haven't done anything with maratis from this process yet, But that's coming this weekend.

yeah....gonna need help with the blender import/export stuff, i know i can go to a blender tute site, but I need it in normal english, not linuxspeak. things i know i'm gonna need help with....texture import in blender , importing a model in maratis , how would bones/rigging from a different modeler work in blender?

Can you elaborate, on how data from the johnflower site, can add 'detail' to a existing heightmap ?

The data from  johnflower seems to just be heightmaps ( which is the realworld data you refer to) ,so Im confused atm what you mean.

Also,and this isn't entirely fair to ask you ,,,Zester I think is away doing dev work on Ubuntu phone,so could you possibly elaborate on how he made/applied his terrain texture ? It has several  textures which wouldn't be ideal/easy for average person to deal with given faik, it mandates shaders,,did he possibly just texture the terrain inside a paint app and bring that uvmap back in or just update it.

thx
gm

That Rage terrain is pretty cool.

So while I was studying anael's rage terrain screenshot, I was completely stumped I had no clue on how they were generating that surface detail. I tried for days and couldn't get anything remotely comparable. And I knew that they were not modeling every detail by hand and even with shaders and there mega texturing system there was something particular going on in that terrain that I wasn't figuring into the problem.

Then it came to me ........ there using 16bit heightmaps.

Most of us are accustom to using 8bit heightmaps and wouldn't know a 16bit heightmap if it hit us in the face well no one would.
The additional coding in a 16bit heightmap is invisible to not only our eyes but your computer screen.

So I tried it out I loaded a 16bit height map I found online into blender and used a subdivided plane and a displacement modifier, the heightmap I used was of a small (1 square mile) section of New Zealand. At first it just looked like any other boring no detail terrain. Then I remembered what the guy on that johnflower site said about uping the poly count. So I subdivided until I had about
200,000 faces about what that rage terrain probably has. And you know what I started to see!!!!!! Roads, cracks in the earth, lots and lots of surface detail made that rage terrain look like some indie job!!!!

And anaels right my terrain was just a diffuse map painted in blender. Using the differant brushes and setting,s. Nothing special or even hard.

I didn't use any external image editing applications and I only used the TexDraw brush(It should be the default brush in texture paint mode) that comes with blender and I adjusted the "Radius(Size of Brush)" and "Strength"(How transparent the paint is) depending on what I was painting.

I used 4 different textures(images to paint with).
1. Dirt
2. Rock
3. Ground Clutter(Grass, Leafs, Twigs, ...)
4. Roots

It wasn't hard and didn't take long to do. You don't need to be an artist. Even if you cant draw a stick
figure you could still do just as good of a job if not better if you spent a bit more time on  it.

I will make a tutorial, might take a day or two because I like to take a pic for every step.

I'm still having no luck getting what I texture paint inside Maratis from blender or any other modeler. I know this is a OLD thread but its certainly applicable still.

I saw Anael's page about multiple materials, but that is of very little help, because materials alone give no depth whatsoever ( short of VERY simple visuals/games), so for decent professional work you need texture painting , but maybe the way Im doing it wont come into maratis from its exporter.

I cant get the object and its texture inside maratis, but instead of a lot of grass on one EDGE of terrain model and sand everywhere else, its like sand is mostly everywhere, and grass only in small bits    in a few places, and this is definitely not how it looks inside blender, yet blender render shows it closer to how it shows up inside maratis.Very confusing.

I wish zester had been more specific about how he did the splatting texture work, but given what Im doing so far isn't working as far as getting it to look right inside maratis, I wonder if zester was just using stencil maps inbetween his textures, where atm IM not doing that as I just load the textures and start painting with 'texture painting' panel.

Ive been Very busy making models so Im left texturing for another day, but that is coming very soon , so I wanted to get back into it. I guess I'll have a look at the Tutorials on wiki, but I also felt that if someone came here first and saw this they might be a bit confused, as 'materials' here that sadwolf used LOOK more like textures than materials.

Thx
hs

HM I never thought about     skethcup, so Ill give that a try, but I wasnt' aware it allowed you to paint with multiple textures on one object or does it ? < Ill try and see>

Ya I'd forgotten about sculptris as I've been primarily using  it for modeling , and when I try texturing with it, the textures wind up looking dull and washed out so clearly I need to fiddle with some settings, so I"ll give that a go. EDIT: Ok ya, clearly when I tried it initialy I had used 512 for size,,trying at the very least 2048 seems to make a big differnence, imagine that;)

thx for verification about blender, as it seems somebody that knows a lot more of how an what it does will need to help us on this issue. Frankly I really think I prefer sculptris, so I'll try it along with skethcup ( though for awesome features you really need PRO version, but meh). Actually now that I see the website, not even a non profit organization as I have, can use sketchup make for profit of anykind, so that's out of the question now Even a non profit is allowed to make some profit , as long as its under the norm.

Cheers
hs