Beginner's Questions about Terrains / Outdoor maps

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Sat Sep 22, 2007 10:51 pm

Hi there,

I'm kinda new here and want to try to make an 3rd person RPG with Irrlicht and Newton

I've been trying for some days and have some questions now:

1. It isn't possible to - for example - create a cave in a mountain with a heightmap, is it? As I understand it the principle of heightmaps doesn't allow this, but I thought I'd ask anyway

[solved, not possible. using heightmaps with mesh hills on it]
2. The old topic: mesh file format... Because I don't think I can use a heightmap for the terrain, what should I use? And any suggestions for the animated player? :/
[solved, .X for animated, .3ds for static if Blender's expoters are gonna make it ]
3. I have the Irrlicht dwarf and a heightmapped terrain working together with Newton, so my dwarf is no longer falling through the landscape

But his feet are still below the terrain... How can I fix this? Should I create the player as a ragdoll, so his feet can tilt on the ground!?

Thanks,
Daerst

slaaitjuh · Post by **slaaitjuh** » Sun Sep 23, 2007 9:58 am

you should write a mod on the terrain scene node allowing holes in the map where you can put bsp trees that are indoor cave levels.....

that's also better for optimization of your levels etc. Outdoor has to be rendered differently than indoor

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Sun Sep 23, 2007 11:19 am

hey slaatijuh,

thanks for your answer

I think this could get rather complicated, especially when i want to make a cave in a completely vertical wall or something... I'd prefer modelling the whole thing in Blender or any other modelling program.

What mesh format?

Daerst

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 5:11 pm

Okay, I'm game for anything... Is there such a big difference between modelling the whole thing as 3ds for example or using a heightmap? If so, I'd use heightmaps as basic terrains and would just model the hills that got caves or something not possible with heightmaps in Blender. If not, I'd model everything in Blender =) Someone got a clue?

arras · Post by **arras** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 8:23 pm

You should be able to create cave with two terrains and height maps. One providing floor, second providing celling. Kind of Cave run demo from Dark Basic. Somebody did something similar and posted in Project forum. Search there. Its maximum few months old.

Also notice that most of the games made things easier by not modeling caves in the same space as main terrain. Just provide gate and once player reach certain area or switch trigger (touching door or entrance) it loads cave scene.

Umbra · Post by **Umbra** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 10:19 am

For our project i model everything in lightwave including caves and hightmaps.

For caves i simply make an hightmap apply it to the groundplane and then flip it upside down and bend it

and then i add a floor to that.

atm we use x for pretty much everything.

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 4:41 pm

Hi there, thx for your answers, helped me quite a lot

When I speak of caves, I basically mean any dimple in a mountain, it may be not worth loading at all... for example it' just a small 20m² cave with only one chest in it - i think there's no other way than modelling the mountain, is it?
Hope you get what I mean, if not I'll make a drawing or screenshot ^^ THX!

monkeycracks · Post by **monkeycracks** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 8:42 pm

Perhaps you could have a heightmap and a mountain mesh. The mountain mesh would have the cave, etc. modeled into it and you simply place the mountain on the heightmap somewhere.

Just a thought

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 9:43 pm

Yeah, that's what I ment. Gotta be hard to have the textures fitting I suppose but it seems to be the only way, so I'll go for it

Btw, anybody got an answer to my question No. 3?

Myself wrote:3. I have the Irrlicht dwarf and a heightmapped terrain working together with Newton, so my dwarf is no longer falling through the landscape Wink But his feet are still below the terrain... How can I fix this? Should I create the player as a ragdoll, so his feet can tilt on the ground!?

Thx

Daerst

Umbra · Post by **Umbra** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 10:30 am

You can always test with a premade terrain and simply make a whole in it. Personaly i dont like using hightmaps since its gives little real control of the terrain. We are experimenting with different technics for this in our project..

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Sat Sep 29, 2007 10:04 am

Hi there, it's Daerst and his terrain issue again...
I read the "Another quick tutorial: creating terrain in Blender" tutorial (click me) and tried out that terrain... Framerate is ok, made some more detailed terrains myself, think I'm gonna do it that way - but I have two problems:

a) I activated backface culling, but I still can see some backfaces through the mountains.. So if i stand in front of a mountain and look through it, i can see the inside faces of the mountain's other side. How to fix that?
b) If I go above the terrain (if you imagine it as a box, so above the mesh's highest point) the terrain disappears until I enter it's "bounding box" again. Any way to change that?

Tried it as both .x and .obj, same problem. Normals seem to be ok in Blender... I used Omari's latest X-Exporter for .x and the Blender standard Wavefront exporter for .obj.

Thank you!

Umbra · Post by **Umbra** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 1:37 pm

Daerst wrote:Hi there, it's Daerst and his terrain issue again...
I read the "Another quick tutorial: creating terrain in Blender" tutorial (click me) and tried out that terrain... Framerate is ok, made some more detailed terrains myself, think I'm gonna do it that way - but I have two problems:

a) I activated backface culling, but I still can see some backfaces through the mountains.. So if i stand in front of a mountain and look through it, i can see the inside faces of the mountain's other side. How to fix that?

-- You have to make the collison so it dont use the cam for col checking

b) If I go above the terrain (if you imagine it as a box, so above the mesh's highest point) the terrain disappears until I enter it's "bounding box" again. Any way to change that?

-- Not sure what you meen

Tried it as both .x and .obj, same problem. Normals seem to be ok in Blender... I used Omari's latest X-Exporter for .x and the Blender standard Wavefront exporter for .obj.

Thank you!

Daerst · Post by **Daerst** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 6:51 pm

-- You have to make the collison so it dont use the cam for col checking

I don't go through the terrain, i just see the ... Well I made a screenshot, it's hard to explain ^^

I marked it with a red line... there i can't see parts of the faces is should see but the faces that lie behind them Oo

b) When I depart too far from my mesh it vanished, It comes back when I come close again. Got it? ^^

[EDIT: SOLVED] stupid me, i set camera's FarValue to zero XD Face problems also solved that way