DeleD Community Edition

[Sindwiller]

Hello everyone!

First, just to be clear, thats not just an simple feature request. I know that this feature is maybe discussed several times and i also know that this feature is already present (Terrain Plug-in). And mainly, i want just to make a discussion about this feature. Is it important? How can it be realized? Would it make more Pro-Buyers?

Im making levels. Also called maps . Generally, indoor maps. Indoor mapping is very cool and complicated. Especially when you work with high detail geometry. But it also has benefits: lesser work, better optimizations possible, higher detail. Cool.

Im also interested on outdoor maps. Maps who combine indoor (houses and other buildings) design and terrain. DeleD is capable of modeling for indoor. But not for outdoor. For an outdoor map, you need an terrain generator (or something else) based on heightmaps. You can edit the heightmap directly or edit the map over an 3D-interface.

DeleD has this already. Theoretically. Its just an plugin. And its useful. But not powerful enough. There are way to much polygons created. And high detailed terrain can only be made with intricacies.

The question is: What the heck do i mean with high detailed terrain. Difficult question. Detailed terrain means terrain, that is so made, like the artist has it in mind. Example: An artist wants to make 2 hills. The first should be half as large the second is. He wants that. Yes. But when he tries to paint that on the heightmap, the second is smaller than the first. I think you know what i mean?

Let the discussion begin! (or something)

Wfr, Sindwiller
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"Ave Jeroen et Paul-Jan!" populus clamant.

[Daaark]

I think:

1) A better plugin can handle this.
The current plugin makes way too many polygons. We could all band together and make a nice plugin, but there are already existing terrain programs out there that export to obj. Deled in turn, can import obj. The best terrain editors are the best terrain editors because all they are is terrain editors.

2) It's not jereon and pj's job to add every feature under the sun. They are best left to fixing bugs, improving old functionality, and adding new features that help people in every area of modelling.
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[granada]

[Warfare Unlimited]

I would suggest at most just adding a height map/texture import.

[Sindwiller]

[vincent-v]

For me, it's very important to make outdoor maps. I think a good terrain editor would be like that :

- You can import a heightmap and modifiy terrain directly in 3d view with a brush
- Tiling texture (maybe multi-layer with alpha blending ?) like UT2K4 or a big texture, like Far Cry.

[Basiror]

editing the topology to create overhangs or maybe caves should also be considered

the best solution in my eyes would be nurbs driver terrain, you can handle simple heightmaps and with some controlpoint manipulation you can create caves as well.


combined with a texture painting tool, you have a terrain surface and a paint tool that allows you to draw pieces of arbitrary textures onto the terrain and the blend factors per texel are stored in a external file.

for the final export you could combine the texture layers to a unique texture including unique normal map, that can be used to render the terrain

[Mr.Fletcher]

I see this more as a task for plugins here. Would painting the blend information to the vertices only be sufficient or does this need to be done per texel?
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[Basiror]

per texel, thats the clue and the reason why you combine the textures into a final texture

this way you can blend an arbitrary amount of textures with only 2 texture units required for rendering them

gf8xxxx can handle 16 textures at once thats 8x(color & normal map) results in 16 texture lookups in the fragment shader, a texture lookup costs several hundred cycles and stalls the fragmentshader thread,

combining them per texel requires you to implement some kind of texture streaming system ala quake4 mega textures, but increases your rendering speed enormously

plus adds a lot of additional detail

P.S.: As an implementation advice, if you implement such a system your need to sample in the target space e.g.: get uv coordinate in target image (u,v) and interpolate in the source image (the blended layers) via trilinear(bilinear per mipmap & linear between mipmaps) filtering, this guarantees you a sharp texture

I can assist you since I plan to implement something similar in my own 3d engine project, just leave me a pm or contact me per mail

[Mr.Fletcher]

Why don't you create a plugin for this yourself, since you seem to know what you're talking about? (no offence intended)
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[Basiror]

well since its not quite compatible with the plugin system currently implemented

- currently there are no nurbs surfaces implemented
- I had to write my own 3d view with user interaction and combine the textures, but there s no way I can preserve the information about which layers have been combined
thats not really a feature that is suited for a plugin, it features a whole new primitive (nurbs patches) and for the sake of efficiency this is really part of the core of deled.

One could implement is as some kind of multi pass renderer with alpha blending enabled

this however requires an arbitrary number of textures per material which is currently not supported (only 3 layers + lightmap)