When I use World-Machine and tribes ed I get bumpy terrain. I’ve tried bluring, smoothing, low-pass height filtering and a number of other things but I can’t keep the ground from containing 200,000,000 bumps per square foot.
Anyone know how I can get the ground (not just the hills) to be smooth? This is what the problem looks like:
From your description it sounds like, whatever you do in WM will not give you a flat/smooth surface.
I think it is some small bug in WM when saving to some file types, that aggravates detail into “instability”. If the output format has a smaller colour depth, the smallest difference of height will be a big bump.
What file format are you using? My gess is TGA. The TGA output of WM is not 100% grey and looks slightly yellow. The R,G and b are not always at the same values and vary in different places, it may be a cause for that.
Try using some file format (the highest colour depth the better) and converting it to the format you want in an image editor program.
The second best thing for now, is to use an image editor and remove the bumps in post processing, by hand.
This is just a though, so it can be something else… What file are you saving it to?
Thanks for the reply.
I’ve been having it save as a windows BMP and then I open up photoshop and change the mode from rgb to grayscale because that’s what tribes ed requires. What file format would you suggest I save to?
I just tried greyscale tga, and 8bit-RAW and the same thing happens… I don’t know what program opens a 32bit RAW-FP or povray tga16. Shazbot
hm… So much for that file type stuff…
Do you have terragen? You could save in .ter, open it in terragen, and try to render that part of the terain to see if it also happens in terragen. If it does, I would think it is not a prblem of saving to certain file types 
Are you using erosion devices?
Some eroding can cause those types of ups and downs… But they should mash out using a blur or low-pass filter etc…
I think I’ll just smooth it after I get it into tribes ed
You are saving to 8 bit formats, so it is almost certainly a format/accuracy issue. The “detail” that you see in World Machine will translate into “bumpiness” in Tribes because the terrain resolution is low, and the number of altitude levels is only 256 (8 bit). You will have to make your terrains smoother in WM. Alternatively you can try saving a .RAW image of the terrain, opening it in Photoshop, then exporting as .BMP or whatever format Tribes supports. But I don’t think the results will be any better. It is a limitation of the 8 bit image formats that Tribes seems to support for heightfields. Do you know what the native Tribes heightfield format is, or what formats it can import besides .bmp?
- Oshyan
Thanks for your help. I found a “convert to g16” feature in tribes ed. It’s converting from 8-bit so obviously data is lost, but the problem isn’t as bad and I can use the terrain smoothing tool.
However, can you tell me which of the formats that are savable in world-machine are 16-bit or more? What opens a povray TGA16? What opens Leveller format? And the same with 32bit RAW-FP… is that a native format?
Hey there,
the 16bit or greater formats in WM are:
RAWFP32 (32bit)
Terragen (16bit)
Leveller (16bit)
Povray TGA (16bit)
The last three are all more or less intended for their specific applications – the Terragen .TER format for terragen, etc.
If the Tribes editor supports importing 16bit PNGs, there is a converter tool that was written from RAW32 to PNG. I can dig around and see if I can find it.