Tiled world export questions?

Bug Reports
#1

Hi there,

My questions are a follow the previous topic I posted a few days ago.

basically I am working on a large tiled terrain, the basic terrain is generated from DEMs, my terrain is 16 by 13 tiles each tile is 110 Kms Square.

I have set up my tree and it all works fine so far…

the issues i have are when building a tiled world.

1-Normal & texture Maps/ When exporting Normal and Colour maps, I get horizontal banding on each tile, it is more evident in the normal map than the colour map, I have tried all format PNG, BMP and Tiffs both 8 bit and 16 bit and still cant get rid of it, If i do a normal build the issue doesn’t happen.

2-Mesh Export/ When exporting the mesh no matter what software I import the mesh to Maya, XSI or Max the mesh is always perpendicular to the world and has to be rotated in scene, am I missing an option to change the mesh axis?

3-Scaling/ The world and all the units in WM are set to Kms yet when importing to a 3D software it always comes in too small and needs to be scaled up massively despite the 3D package being set to kilometers as well.

4-On our project we are flying from one end of the map to the other end of the map, is there a way to export the tiles at different resolutions where I can have the origin and destination tiles exported at a high res and the in between tiles at a low res? and still maintain the tiled nature of both the Mesh and the maps?

Any help or advice on these would be much appreciated.

Many thanks

#2

Any comments at all?? Anyone?

#3

The banding looks like the edge of the tiles. Have you tried to blend more in the Tile build options? Blending percentage

#4

Hello,

I haven’t tried changing the blend percentages, but I will when I get to work tomorrow and let you know.

Do you have any thoughts about the other questions please?

Cheers

Ahmed

#5

Hi Ahmed,

Regarding the seaming problem, the big question is : If you re-import your tileset into World Machine using a Tiled File Input, especially the normal map outputs that you see the crease in, do you see the crease in the resulting output from that device?

If not, then the crease is not in the actual data, but rather in the interpretation of the data – this is usually a case of the “shared edges” option being set or not set appropriately.

If you see the creases in the imported tile data in WM, then there might be something else at play – you shouldn’t get a single pixel crease when any amount of blending above 0% is enabled. Can you try this and report back?

#2: This is likely from WM and those applications using different handed-ness conventions. This is easy enough to add an option for – I will see about getting this into a version soon.

#3: In the mesh exporter, the Coordinate System selection controls the output scale. If you select Normalized, for example, the resulting mesh will always lie between 0…1. Kilometers will export where 1km = 1 unit, so the bounding rectangle of your terrain will be whatever is reported in the world size dialog (so a 80km x 80km should reside within an 80x80 box). Finally, exporting in meters will multiply that last by 1000.

#4: Unfortunately, differently-sized tiles within the same tileset is currently not supported. Variable-density mesh export is something I would like to add sometime soon, which would give you a way to control the geometry density in the entire export area, but for now this is not possible.

#6

Hi Stephen, Hotshot

The issues I wrote about before.

1/ I managed to get the map issue to disappear, you were both right it was the blending percentage, I increased it from 12% to 25% and it seems to have gone now so that’s great.

2/ about the import axis, I just wanted to check that I wasn’t missing an option regarding the upaxis for the mesh, so will look forward to whenever that’s implemented in the new build I am sure it will be very handy for us all.

3/ I have rexported a new mesh I created which was suppose to be 50km sq using every export option there is, “normalised, Kms, WM units…etc” and still the mesh is being imported in far too small, I am not sure how to solve that one yet :frowning:

4/ So we can’t get to chose which ones get exported at which Res, but is there a way to get the exported high res mesh to still tile with the lower res export? or is it we either have the whole set high res or low res.

I look forward to your comments

thanks

#7

Hi there,

Any thoughts on the last message I posted?

Thanks

#8

Ahmed,

Glad to hear issue #1 went away!

#3 : Perhaps we can track this down – what renderer are you targeting and bringing the mesh into? What size does it report for the mesh? What size are you expecting?

I just verified that for example, if you export a mesh from the default 8km x 8km world set to meters in WM, the resulting object vertices will range from 0…8000.

#4 : Unfortunately no simple “checkbox” way.

If its very important, it would be possible to hack around this with a bit of work however:

Take a look at this thread (http://forum.world-machine.com/index.php?topic=2485.0) and the network graph I posted in response.

We’re going to do something similar, with a low res first pass and a high res second one.

  1. Export a low-res world (meshes, heightfields, colors) that will cover all areas.
  2. Re-import that low-res world using a Tiled File Input device(s).
  3. For each type of output, use a Chooser to choose between the low-res tile file input and the high-res native world output that we are about to build. To guide the chooser, use a Layout Generator or similar to sketch the areas of high detail and plug it into the control input.
  4. Build the tileset at a higher resolution. You will probably want to select for building only those tiles that contain your high-res guide map. In your tiled options, make sure your “Calculate edge tiles on partial tilesets” is set to ON.

Key to making this work properly is to make your Chooser mask not go to 100% right at the tile boundary – offset it into the inside of the tile a bit, and the result will be that your high res meshes will reduce resolution and match their low res neighbors perfectly – though definitely with a bit of work from you!

How well the above process works depends on your needs and your world file. I wouldn’t normally recommend it, but if its very important, the option is available.

I’ve attached an example world demonstrating the technique. Please note that it requires the latest 2.9.0.4 DevChannel build to open!

#9

Thanks for that Stephen,

I will try this and get back to you ASAP.

#10