best terrain editor

Ruz

yeah what is the best terrain editor out there?. I am looking for something that outputs to xml

I am thinking of either going down the terrian route or building an environment in max and probably

I will have more control over it.

I suppose with good terrain editors like un unreal engine you can paint decals on the landscape,

blended alpha stuff etc

any advice is appreciated

Rob Galanakis

You started your own company, right? My suggestion would be to do something in Max and output it to XML yourself. Using pre-built tools are great because they can save lots of work, but something pretty essential, like a terrain editor, you will probably want to program yourself (or just write a custom exporter for). Doing it in Max (or preferably XSI or Maya...) makes it much faster and cheaper to make than a stand-alone.

I've used Earth Sculptor briefly, that is a free stand alone editor. Check it out.

MoP

Moving thread to Technical Talk, fits better there.

What form of terrain editing are you after? There are different options for different stages of the pipeline.
For example, World Machine or Terragen can be a good start for a heightmap-based terrain, then you just deform a grid in your engine with that heightmap.
Otherwise I imagine it'd be similar to Maya's 3D Sculpt tool, or Max's push/pull deformation, if you want the most flexibility.

Ruz

I suppose I have two options ie build in a 3d program using tiled textures and add my own trees etc which which takes more time or go for the terrain editor.
There are a few terrain editors for xna, but they are a little quirky for my liking

The environment itself will be a mixture of organic background and concrete structures so I was thinking terrain editor for the naturey stuff and 3dsmax for the static meshes.

I am thinking that max would be a bit better in some regards as I will have more control over look of it.

Anyway i will check out the suggestions you guys mentioned, cheers

Rob Galanakis

Also, not to try and send you somewhere without reason, you may also have luck asking here: http://tech-artists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=17 The forum is filled with tech artists who probably have a more rounded experience using a number of level editors (it sounds like you want a level/world editor, not just a terrain editor?). Also this may be a good reference for what you can do in Max: http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1250#post1250

Ruz

Professor420 - cheers for that, will have a look see