4 Mile valley tanking object

[8thJinx]

I wanted something like the old valleys from the square land mass map in AH2.  This is first pass, maybe 20 minutes of work.

[8thJinx]

If anyone wants to play around, this is the original 10 meter heightfield, from the Wasatch Mountains in Utah.  You have to smooth out the surrounding valleys to cut down on polys and vertices.  Ultimately, you want a 4 mile land object that doesn't exceed to the 4 mile airfield, which is around 22,000 polys and 24,000 vertices.  A lot of this smoothing and leveling can be accomplished inside of L3DT.  Then you can fine-tune more in AC3D, by combining polys.

[8thJinx]

The valley would have a motor pool GV base and spawns along these lines.

[Ciaphas]

22k for the airfield? Holy cow that’s way to many haha


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[8thJinx]

That's nothing, when you import that heightfield into L3DT, prior to any smoothing or decimation, the ploy count is in the millions.  I'm playing with Blender right now because it has a quicker and easier decimation tool. 

The process looks like it's going to end up being:

1. Get a heightfield from Terrain.Party.
2. Import that into L3DT for the first round of smoothing and sculpting. Export to OBJ.
3. Import OBJ file into Blender for decimation.
4. Import decimated OBJ file to AC3D for cleaning up the edge polys and vertices.

[8thJinx]

This is what Blender's decimate tool can do in four seconds.  The first image is the smoothed valley object from L3DT, post-smooting, at 288,000 polys.




This is what the valley polys look like after hitting the decimate function once.  Total poly count for the four mile object dropped from 288,000 to 21,000 (ish).

[Ciaphas]

Is that 22k for the terrain object or the airfield object?


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[8thJinx]

The mega airfield with the spread out town is called laf4x4m.  It is a 4 mile square land object.  For the object terrain only (just the ground, not including the non-terrainset buildings, gun pits, hangar, etc), the poly count is 28,440.  The vertex count it 21,400.

So to make sure you create a 4 mile land object that won't tax frame rate, it's a safe bet to make sure you come in under those numbers.  It helps even more when you don't have to add all the town buildings, gun pits, hangars, etc. 

Blender's decimate tool is a huge time saver.  I went from 4 million polys to 21,000 polys in a matter of minutes.  The next step is to section off the whole thing into a structured hierarchy, which AC3D does really well and really quickly.  You basically create a cookie cutter object, move it over the land object, and slice up the land object into discrete 1/4 mile quadrants, and order those quadrants in the hierarchy in a structured pattern.  That step cuts down on the collision model calculations, and leaves you with a flyable terrain.

[8thJinx]

This is the valley at 16,800 polys.

[Ciaphas]

Pretty cool man!


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[715]

Very neat idea 8thJinx.

Is it possible to get Blender to decimate only certain areas of the poly map, i.e. decimate areas tanks are not likely to travel but keep somewhat higher resolution in areas they will?  (Obviously extra work for the designer to decide what areas to keep higher resolution.)

[8thJinx]

I have to check into that.  I do believe the decimate function can be applied to specific areas that you select, but you have to separate the land object into multiple objects if you want to decimate only one, or decimate several with different ratios.  I'm pretty sure the decimate function only works on whole objects that you select.  But you can have multiple objects in a model.  And you might need to make sure the vertices along the boundaries all line up when you're all done.   
 

[8thJinx]

Here it is at 16,400 polys, with one central valley.