Terrain in Leadwerks 3

[cassius]

When we get terrain for le3 will it be based on le2 terrain system with its own editor or will it be more like the terrain generater in 3dws?

[Josh]

The terrain tools will resemble Leadwerks 2 tools, except I'm using a virtual texturing system instead of splatting, so it should remove the limits we had on number of layers.

 

I actually start working on terrain today. The tessellation capabilities of OpenGL 4 will be interesting.

[cassius]

Sounds good. Thanks.

[Rastar]

What do you mean by "virtual texturing system" as opposed to splatting? I'm getting a little nervous here, since tools like World Machine give you wonderful splat maps with actual geological meaning (like erosion, deposition etc.) which I would like to continue using in Leadwerks 3.

[AggrorJorn]

Splatting was used in LE2 to store terrain texture info. This had the negative side effect of only supporting 5 paint layers. The virtual texturing system simply allows you to have way more paint layers.

[Furbolg]

This had the negative side effect of only supporting 5 paint layers.

 

That's not fully true, you could use more then 5 textures by having multiple "splat"-maps or split the terrain in chunks where every chunk (16x16 or 32x32 usually) can have his own 5 textures.

[AggrorJorn]

That is true but then you would have to know how to do this programmatically. The editor only allowed selecting 1 out of 5 layers and not 'chunks' of the selected layer. It would have been cool to have that support though. nice idea.

[Josh]

Raster,

What do you mean by "virtual texturing system" as opposed to splatting? I'm getting a little nervous here, since tools like World Machine give you wonderful splat maps with actual geological meaning (like erosion, deposition etc.) which I would like to continue using in Leadwerks 3.

The appearance will be the same (if done right) but internally the rendering is handle differently. This could allow a lot more texture layers without being limited by the GPU number of texture slots.

[YouGroove]

Will it be shaders possible on terrains multitexturing ? normal map , specular ?

[karmacomposer]

I am VERY excited the hear this. GO JOSH!

 

Can't wait for it to come out. Is there a way to get push notifications when a new version of leadwerks 3 comes out?

 

Right now I just have to run the updater to see if there is anything new?

 

Mike

[josk]

+1 for notifications.

[Josh]

I am VERY excited the hear this. GO JOSH!

Thanks for the encouragement.

[dennis]

GO JOSH! amazing work! I have waited for this haha. How's development going and will we be able to import our LE2 terrain?

or at least the raw file ?