tetsuoswrath Posted December 14, 2012 Share Posted December 14, 2012 Can anyone give me a description on how to use Annwyn to combine quads? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrickyVein Posted January 17, 2013 Author Share Posted January 17, 2013 I've never had to use Annwyn. I'm sorry I can't help you, tetsuowrath but I know many other people have used it and probably could. :thumbsup: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
someguy2000 Posted April 1, 2013 Share Posted April 1, 2013 I hate to engage in necromancy, but I just want to commend TrickyVein for posting this tutorial. It has been an incredible boon for my recent efforts at worldspace production. Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrickyVein Posted April 1, 2013 Author Share Posted April 1, 2013 Excellent. You are quite welcome. I am glad that you have found it useful - and please share your results if you are so inclined. We could always stand to have more discussion on the methods one uses to achieve a nice-looking heightmap as no two are created equal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
someguy2000 Posted April 1, 2013 Share Posted April 1, 2013 Sure - I took an unpopulated stretch of desert east of the Imperial Valley and managed to import it after following your guide. Granted, it involved several hours of tweaking the gradient and gaussian blur (with many failures), as well as a good deal of massaging within the heightmap editor (lots of smoothing the exaggerated peaks), but I'm pleased with the end result. It certainly feels more organic than the blocky crap that I've smudged onto the editor in worldspaces past. Learning to use Regions was a separate endeavor (and I'm still not entirely confident in its operation), but I did manage to lay out the groundwork for changing ecosystems that reflect the elevation and relative aridity of the real-world location. I'm away from my PC at the moment, but I'll post the results when I get home. It's ~164 chunks, and I initiated the terrain mesh generation at about 1 a.m. this morning. I'm hoping it will be wrapped up tonight. Like a lot of my content, this started as an experiment when I was bored, then I was sucked into it. I then decided to write the worldspace into my upcoming companion mod, "Russell", as a new site to host quest content (as real estate in the Mojave is increasingly scarce). Between your guide and the Regions tool, I'm hoping to incorporate more real-world locations in the future. I just wish I'd had a better grasp on these systems before I started on Firebase Zulu. Having hand-crafted and cluttered a new worldspace, I doubly appreciate this stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrickyVein Posted April 1, 2013 Author Share Posted April 1, 2013 164 chunks - so it's two quads in total area? The folks behind Project Brazil have been working on a rectilinear heightmap with success. So I hope the terrain mesh generation process doesn't get hung-up. What I have discovered is that it is absolutely essential that your heightmap occupy whole quads in total area - a few extra, errant cells crash the GECK during LOD generation. I've always stuck to using square heightmaps with no issues. Yeah. There really isn't any 'blanket' contingency that I can write into the tutorial that guarantees the best outcome for fudging with the heightmap itself once you download the DEM data. It depends on the data! Only that the range of values between the lowest and highest value should be constrained and is much smaller than you expect it to be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
someguy2000 Posted April 1, 2013 Share Posted April 1, 2013 (edited) Yeah. There really isn't any 'blanket' contingency that I can write into the tutorial that guarantees the best outcome for fudging with the heightmap itself once you download the DEM data. It depends on the data! Only that the range of values between the lowest and highest value should be constrained and is much smaller than you expect it to be. Yeah, I just assumed that was an unavoidable aspect of importing heightmaps. It was much, much more effective than my past (and altogether fruitless) attempts to import topographic data with Tesannwyn (good tool, but I struggled with it). As for the quads... crap, I hope it isn't hung up. If so, then it's back to the drawing board. No worries, though - I only procedurally generated some flora, but there wasn't a lot invested in it so far. Edited April 1, 2013 by someguy2000 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrickyVein Posted April 10, 2013 Author Share Posted April 10, 2013 Some most welcome news! An older CS of photoshop is now being offered free to download, available here. I am glad to say now that this tutorial makes use of only freely available programs for the benefit of all of our nexus users :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
someguy2000 Posted April 15, 2013 Share Posted April 15, 2013 TrickyVein, Somewhere along the line I f*#@ed this up good and proper: http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/158/screenshot200b.jpg Any pointers or suggestions to rectify this eyesore? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrickyVein Posted April 15, 2013 Author Share Posted April 15, 2013 (edited) Have you since regenerated terrain textures without first deleting your old dlod settings for your wasteland (in 'data\LODsettings\[name of your worldspace]')? These settings should be created anew with each successive build. I remember this happening to me too, and I forget exactly what you have to do to mess up your texture LOD - because it's been a few months since I last worked on a new worldspace - but I'm pretty sure it has to do with regenerating terrain textures without clearing your dlod settings first. Issues with regenerating object LOD arise from the same. Another possibility is that you have since painted on an additional terrain texture without regenerating terrain textures. Actually, scratch that. That shouldn't matter. In either case, what you've done isn't permanent, and as long as you continue to work on your worldspace it probably won't be the first time you find yourself having to regenerate terrain textures or even LOD meshes. Just remember to always delete your dlod settings before doing so, at least before a final build. That is my thinking; if it doesn't work, I'll try and reproduce the error so I can be of more help. Edited April 15, 2013 by TrickyVein Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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