Understanding the terrain painting

chrisradsby

Hey guys.
I've been having some issues with CryEngine lately that has stopped me from progressing. It's mainly related to the terrain painting and how to understand it.

I do understand that you need to go through and highpass your terrain texture because it uses the editors own coloring system to help with the visual fidelity. However when I have painted some stuff down on the terrain and then use Generate Surface Textures I end up with weird visual color splotches (looks like color artifacts from compression).

I'm pretty sure I set the Terrain Heightmap Texture size to 2048x2048 , 1 meter per unit.

I have 4 terrain tiles and I've set the tiles resolution to be 2k each. Then after I painted out some basic materials, save and use Generate Surface Textures at 4096x4096 and I get the visual splotches.

Is it me just using the wrong settings or what? I just need to understand this properly before going in.

Before and After Generate Surface Textures.


So how can I avoid this?

Thanks for the help guys!

chrisradsby

I seem to have found a solution for the color-compression artifacts at least. Typical when I just asked for help and everything.

SOLVED:
"When the generated surface texture is compressed using DXT, its colors always get somewhat distorted. If the colors use the full dynamic range (0-255), they are preserved better. If artists know that they have used only darker colors in the level, they can use the Terrain Color Multiplier to make the colors use more of the dynamic range. For example, if only colors in the 0-63 range have been used, enter a multiplier of 4 to make them fill the entire 0-255 range and ‘survive’ the compression in better shape. When rendering, the decompressed color values should be divided by the multiplier in the shader to restore the original brightness."

(http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Creating+a+New+Map)


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I would like to keep the thread alive though for future questions that I might have regarding the terrain.