Textures, lighting, terrain

[Guest mattyhalewood]

When I light any of the sand textures you get with 3DWS on a terrain it seems to lose all the detail in the texture. Some of the grass ones work fine, but none of the sand.

 

Picture attached.

 

The top left one is with lighting, not sure why it looks like that.

Anyone come across this problem before?

 

Ive tried messing with intensity and color but no joy, I've also tried installing again.

They are .jpg 1024x1024, I think that one is sand_07.

[Guest mattyhalewood]

Please anyone, this problem is seriously slowing me down. Could someone try lighting a terrain with any of the sand textures for me and let me know what happens?

 

When I export as a .dbo the problem disappears and my terrain looks great but I need to use pixelperfects loader for darkGDK. When I load the .3dw file it looks the same as in 3DWS, wrong.

So, if I get it to look right in 3DWS then it should load right into my game.

 

Thanks.

[Canardia]

Same happens for me when I used sand_05 or sand_07 on a terrain (probably same problem with other sand textures also).

It's probably some nVidia driver problem, since I'm sure it has worked earlier.

[Guest mattyhalewood]

Thanks for testing it for me Lumooja, now I know its not something I'm doing wrong. I am also pretty sure it used to work, when you say its a driver problem, is there anything I can do to fix it?

 

I am using TGC DarkGDK library, interestingly when I create a terrain using this librarys terrain and lighting commands I can re-produce the same problem by having the light intensity too high, I can fix this by lowering the intensity but in 3DWS lowering intensity doesn't fix it, it just makes it darker but texture is still wrong.

 

I really need to fix this or I will have to buy some more software which I don't want to do as I like using 3DWS.

 

Thanks again Lumooja.

[Josh]

It's just a limitation of the way the renderer works. 3D World Studio is designed to work on very old graphics hardware, and it doesn't have very good blending abilities. This won't affect how the terrain looks when you run it in DBPro or another program.

[Guest mattyhalewood]

Thanks Josh, it does look fine as a .dbo, pity I can't use PixelPerfects loader though, that loader is a life-saver, it loads everything as seperate objects and has culling built in.

 

The problem with it for me is that it loads the terrain lighting exactly how it looks in 3DWS which was supposed to be a good thing lol.

 

Btw, this Leadwerks engine looks amazing, I will probably be using it when I move on from DarkGDK, just wish I had access to all the forums first though.

 

Anyway, I will come up with a workaround for my terrain, thanks again Josh.

[Pixel Perfect]

This is a bug in 3DWS, it bleaches all the color out of textures on the terrain when the lightmap is built. Some textures seem worse effected than others. It does not exhibit this with the same textures applied to meshes. However, turn the intensity of lighting up 5 times and you will get an identical effect on the mesh textures too.

 

Sure you can export as DBO and have DARKGDK do the blending for you but you will never get the same color reproduction due to technical issues with DARKGDK's rendering of DBO objects and you will lose the culling as it will group everything into massive heirarchies which prevents the Dark Basic engine from applying frustum culling. This is why I wrote the loader in the first place to get over these problems. Sorry Matty but it's kind of out of my control. If Josh would like to explain why this happens I might be able to apply some sort of algorthm to reverse it in the loader code; but it would be far easier to have it fixed at source.

 

I would recommend you move to the Leadwerks Engine though, it's a far better engine in just about every respect imho

[Guest mattyhalewood]

Thanks for your response Pixel, handy having you here lol.

 

I badly want to buy the Leadwerks engine but I'm committed to Techlords 'DarkGDK Open Source Project' at the moment.

When I watched your video I was reaching for my credit card and accessing the Leadwerks website but I managed to restrain myself lol, thats really impressive stuff.

 

It would be great if they fix the 3DWS issue but I read that they may be planning on moving away from the terrain editing and concentrating on buildings etc for that application.

 

Thanks again dude.

[Pixel Perfect]

I badly want to buy the Leadwerks engine but I'm committed to Techlords 'DarkGDK Open Source Project' at the moment.

Well that's admirable, team work and commitments are important and I respect that. Officially I believe that 3DWS, as it stands, is unsupported now so the likelihood of this being fixed is small. As you say the new version, should that come to fruition, is likely to be a better CSG editor and less of a level editor although as far as I'm aware no definite announcement has been made on functionality yet.

 

If I get some spare time I will look at this issue in a bit more depth and see if there is anything I can do. In the meantime good luck with the project and maybe we'll see you using LE at some point in the future.

[Guest hookkshot]

I'm definately in support of 3DWS 6 and will gladly pay for it. im using 3DWS now and dont seem to think the terrain is muchly used.