3D Engine, Terrain Question, 3D Max = Bleh?

Showster

Hi guys n gals I have a 'question' I need some advice shedding on....

Basically for the past 4/5 years I've been used to making terrain in easy gen / unreal ed by either using height map and editing tools.

This year a couple of us are trying to make our own engine and what not and would very much like to include terrain. As it stands the coder wants to work with the x file format using direct X.

What I want to know is,, can I possibly paint textures onto my terrain mesh in 3d max using vertex colours?? and export that terrain into an x file format?

If I can't use vertex colours what other methods do you guys use for texture placing on terrain? ...

I've seen some 3rd party freeware applications which can make the terrain x file but I don't think I'm gonna have time to filter through everything.

Any ideas on this? I will need to include other static meshes in the terrain and entities etc.. so I need the terrain file to be modified preferably in 3D max although I do have temporary access to maya atm ..

Where could I start looking? (I have tried google, 3dbuzz, 3d total, http://www.gametutorials.com/etc)

Thanks

KDR_11k

Ask your coder how he could get the data. I think .x doesn't support vertex colors but your coder will probably know better. In a worst case scenario you'll hae to paint a "texture-texture", a map that tells the engine what goes where.

CrazyButcher

I just looked up the filespec of .x and it does support vcolors. you could always render your vcolors to texture as well to create a "blend texture".

While vertex colors are quite convient and simple to use, they require relative high tessalation of the terrain for fine control, thinking of roads, paths...

also a nice optimisation is if you want to blend more texturs on top, you could use the RGBA channels individually for each texture (though this is more a sidenote to the coder hehe)