Mesh maker?

[wossname]

I want to design simple 3d terrain like a hilly area.

Any simple *free* mesh editors around?

I hope to graduate to harder tasks later.

[Halsafar]

Depends what your goal is...
I suppose game wise you must decide what method is best for displaying your terrain.

A mesh terrain, if it is small and you use portals then its a good idea it will save you time.

If you want a game with a big wide open area, hilly mountain terrain and you do not wish to design it all by hand then I would use Heightmaps.

A mesh terrain really creates a lot of frustrum checks when culling, also it is hard to break a mesh into a sort of tree heirchy. So for units a mesh is good cause you can just check a sphere to the frustum sphere since a unit usually isn't as large as the terrain.



But to answer your question -- I have no clue where to find any FREE MapEditors but I talk to someone on MSN who has found many I'll get the names for you if he comes online.

[wossname]

You lost me at the word "portals"

[Sastraxi]

Hey woss.
You know, you can make a heightmap in any image editing program; it would just be a different way to bring it into your program. Dark values indicate depressions while light ones indicate heights (like hills).

[Halsafar]

Portal -- A point between two area's that when crossed loads up the next area.

You know in those lovely Action games where you run from room to room. The screen fades black, new room fades in and you start smashing again

I was originally typing a bunch of example games but instead I'll use general examples.
Remember in the NES -- sometimes you just couldn't backtrack -- or a continuation point -- you crossed a portal and all the level info in memory has changed to the next area.

The most general would be to say - "In games when you enter a room and the screen fades black then fades in the new room. You just crossed a portal. The current area info has been cleared and the new area has been loaded."



Heightmap -- A bitmap representing x,z coordinates with y coordinate as the pixel color value (RGB). Of course a scale can be added to the values -- a scale of your choice.

With a heightmap you can simply create nice looking valleys and mountains by simply doing some shading in a bitmap and writing a nice loading algorythm for your heightmap.




A HEIGHTMAP can also be divided into a QUAD TREE which allows for easy CULLING and prevents the need of PORTALS.

Google for each uppercase word and enjoy the knowledge.

[wossname]

I used a height map a couple of days ago (although I didn't know it had a name ) when i was trying to write a custom terrain mesh algorithm. It nearly worked too, but some extra horizontal lines kept appearing.

How can you set it up so you get more than 255 height levels? i used a greyscale heightmap. RGB values aren't sequential unless you use a special filter, or am I wrong?

[Halsafar]

Well you can use a RAW image file...But that is stupid in our age.
Use a regular 16bit bitmap or higher.

You can now use the R Value, G Value, B Value.
When it comes to gray RGB(128,128,128) -- so they are all the same.
Now you can add them up, multiply them, use only a certain color, match color to textures, add a scale to the color.

With the extra horizontal lines -- make sure you are reading in the correct vertice points and make sure you read in the correct indices -- use a trianglelist and consider each pixel = 2 triangles. So each pixel will have 4 vertices and 6 indices.

Make sure you do not create a triangle out of the end two vertices and the next row first two vertices...That is often the problem people have.

[wossname]

I scrapped the algorithm for that a few days ago but basically what I was doing was using an increment array to rapidly fill the indices with the appropriate vertice number. Almost had it working but figured that wasting time on this would be detrimental to my learning other aspects of DX9.

I'll probably go back to it in a week or two.