TerraForge Terrain Editor Beta Released
Community Forums/Showcase/TerraForge Terrain Editor Beta Released
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| Hi there. TerraForge, a new terrain editor (well, new to you) has been in development on and off for quite some time. Now a beta is ready for your evaluation. TerraForge is quite unique in that it does not allow you to directly edit the terrain; rather, it features a set of single click function that apply global changes to the terrain in a much easier, faster, and more realistic way than manual editing. Generally you would start with some random "smart" noise to create a general purpose terrain. (In fact it just goes ahead and creates one on startup). Indeed, this may be good enough for your needs. However, a plethora of single-click affects await you for modifying this base terrain. You can gouge it, stretch it, depress it, plump it, flip it, push it around, make an islend out of it, roughen it, smooth it, shrink it, grow it, and various others. You can even use predefined macros; collections of commands that apply a series of affects that produce interesting results. For now, several macros are pre-loaded. The ability to make your own will come later. When you are ready to save your work, go to the File menu and click Save. You will get a greyscale bitmap of the terrain and a color bitmap for the texture, saved right in the TerraForge directory, numbered with the next available number. A more sophisticated file saving routine will be added at some point. Oh, the texture! This program (as yet unnamed) generates a texture selecting colors based on the height and slope of each point in the terrain. The default is one pixel per terrain vertex, but you can set that you much larger amounts; enough to lock up your computer for quite a while, so be careful! I find 4 to be a good setting for the final texture, and it takes about 30 seconds to create that texture on a 128 x 128 terrain. However, if you set the terrain to something very high, like 1024 x 1024, and also set the texture density to a high level, you can expect to crash your computer or at least occupy its time for quite awhile. Look in the Help menu for additional instructions. send me some email at pbfreedm {at} yahoo.com with your thoughts and suggestions. Get it here |
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| I get a Page not found. |
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| Same here |
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| Oops. Link fixed. |
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| some suggestions: - add 16bit precision and terragen export - "island" should create an island like that, with flat sides - is there a seamless / endless option for mirrored sides? Beside that it is really nice :-) |
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| Thanks to anyone who evaluates this (or tries to). Krischan, - add 16bit precision and terragen export By 16 bit do you mean in a format other than 256 value limited bitmap? Yeah, I need to explore the export project for mesh options. Any suggestions? - "island" should create an island like that, with flat sides Do you mean steeper sides, more clifflike? You can set radius to something like .9, which results in a steep island, but only at that distance, which is a little fake looking. A better option is to create the island first, then run Plump the Hills and/or Reduce the Valleys a few times to get the look right. I'd like to replace these functions with a spline control as in Photoshop curves control, but that will take some doing. I do intend to give a checkbox for round island vs. square. - is there a seamless / endless option for mirrored sides? There is actually, but I suppressed it for some reason I can't remember. I worked on it a long time as well but it wasn't perfect somehow. I think it was just when I tried to display multiple copies in a grid (tiled) it gobbled up too much memory, or something like that. I'll re-enable it and try to remember what the problem was. I know they are cool, but are there any games that actually use endless terrains? Thanks so much for the feedback. -Pete |
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| By 16 bit do you mean in a format other than 256 value limited bitmap? Yeah, I need to explore the export project for mesh options. Any suggestions? If you switch to 3rd person the steps between the bytes from 0...255 are not enough to represent the terrain and you will see them as ugly "stairs". 16bit precision is the way to go and the Terragen file format is perfect for that. Take a look at my BlitzTiles, it uses 16bit Terragen heightmaps, at least you could derive the loader from it and add this to your application for example (it is hidden in the QTS.bb file!). I never wrote a writer but this should be easy. Here are the Terragen specifications. The interesting part is that Terragen doesn't use the heights from 0...65535 or -32768 to 32767 in absolute values - it represents always all 65536 possible relative heights steps between the lowest and the highest value! You can display a hill with a height of 1km with a precision of 2cm. This is very impressive. |
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| Very cool but to be honest I don't see what it does that L3DT can't do (and L3DT creates incredibly detailed textures). I hope I am not coming off as rude! It's just that I have always used L3DT to generate random terrains. |
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| L3DT ist great but has some disadvantages. The climate for example - I'm still too dumb to create my own climate with matching textures - this could be improved a lot. Sometimes it is unstable and it costs money (will TerraForge be free?). Beside that I use Wilbur to create the terrains (which is free) and import them in L3DT to create the stunning textures. Wilbur has some nice fractal routines and tools to "paint" the terrain I miss in L3DT. But Wilbur is unstable, too. In BlitzTiles, the Monkey Island scene is made with Wilbur and the Desert Mesas with L3DT. Zillertal Alps and Grand Canyon are converted SRTM data sets polished with L3DT. |
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| Krischan; so you think the Terragen format is better than a straight mesh? (a format compatible with most 3d systems without modification, .3ds I would think is most universally compatible?) Is .3ds less precise than the Terragen format? If I'm going to require users to incorporate a special function to load TerraForge files, why not use .bmp but use the red and green bytes for high-order, low-order values and get 16-bit precision that way? And yes, TerraForge will be free. stayne: Wilbur and L3DT are impressive tools but really require reading detailed instructions to get going. Wilbur tends to use a lot of technical terms that users won't know, while L3DT produces stunning results that are great for animations, but is really overkill for most games, and is not free. TerraForge does away with all the technical jargon and creates the kind of terrains most actual games have; even high end games. I notice they tend to avoid vast super realistic terrains, preferring to direct the players attention to the gameplay. Still, the simple terrain should be as beautiful and natural-looking as possible. The game designer should be able to run the program once, learn it by doing, and generate all the terrains they need for their game quickly and easily. Really the macros should be the preferred method of construction. Click. Save. Click. Save. Still I have a ways to go. The single choice of color set in the texture is a big limitation (which I'm working on today...) I'm trying to create a kind of 2d gradient represented by a square control in which the y-axis represents altitude and the x-axis represents slope. The color at that spot represents the color that points with those features will be. |
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| L3DT standard is free and always has been as far as I can remember. |
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| I can't remember the problem I had with L3DT, although I had communicated with a developer about it, who was prompt and helpful. Looking at the videos I remember the Sapphire engine, which may not have worked right on my computer for some reason. There was also a tool I used (don't remember which one) that output the texture in multiple small tiles I had to stitch together to use. Ring a bell? |
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| I really like this. Im gunna play around with it and see if its worth useing in a project Im planning :D |
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| > Is .3ds less precise than the Terragen format? At least you must convert the terragen file back to a mesh so it doesn't matter if you keep the size and the tris low. In terragen format I can store terrain sizes with 8192x8192 or higher very easy, in 3ds the detail would be very worse then (65536 vertex limit). But I could stream a part of the terragen terrain and convert it in runtime to a mesh. It is only important if you want to save the heightmap with highest precision or use it in another application, and 8bit heightmap is not very precise. Sure you can use a 16 or 24 bit heightmap format in a bmp, the terragen format was only a suggestion because it is easy to handle, documented, standardized, using relative heights instead of absolute ones and can be imported by other applications (ex. L3DT, Wilbur). |
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| Site was down. Now it's back up. And much faster. And better looking. Not that there's anything there yet but the demo, but I'll have screenshots in the next day or two. And some other tools shortly as well. |
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| Ok, the website now has a gallery of pictures and even a video. Let's try putting a picture or two right here. Showing some presets (formerly called macros)  A nice archipelago:  An enormous area 1024x1024 vertices at 10 meters per vertex =10.24 kilometers on a side. That's over 100 square kilometers. Took about 1 minute on my old Dell, mostly for the texture.  Go to the website for more pictures, a video, and an updated demo (now supports a circular global island effect, in addition to square, and you can apply the effect inwardly (i.e. a lake) as well as outwardly, and upward as well as downward.) Also the smush effect will keep working if you create a second terrain - previously it got confused. http://www.lumpcat.com |
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| This sounds really good! Don't know if it'll help at all, but I did a crude Terragen loader many years ago in Blitz3D. No idea if it's at all relevant these days... Terragen terrain loader Terragen doesn't use the heights from 0...65535 or -32768 to 32767 in absolute values - it represents always all 65536 possible relative heights steps Hmm, that's very clever... and I don't recall coming across this, so I suspect my loader may be no use whatsoever... :/ |
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