My terrain is almost completely sand, but the sand does not act like sand. 1. Skidmarks appear 2. There is no dust 3. I'd also like to give it a sinking feeling, is this possible? I thought about duplicating the terrain and making it non-colliding, offsetting it a bit to give this sinking impression, but I can't figure out how to make it non-colliding Thanks for any help on any or all of these issues!
Awesome thanks for the reply! I'll mess with what you said when I get a chance (probably not for a couple days unfortunately) and report back with any findings
If you name the sand layer in the terrain painter "Sand" or "BeachSand", it will use the sand settings from lua/groundmodel.lua. That should give the right behavior combined with a depth map. Custom groundmodels would help in tuning it, but I don't think that's possible yet. If the depth map doesn't work, check that it's in the correct format. 8 bit greyscale, same size as the heightmap. Exporting the heightmap from Torque editor helps in making the depth map, since it exports the maps for different layers too. Also, with Photoshop filter High Pass on the heightmap you can separate convex and concave shapes. Then you could have for example softer sand on sharp sand ridges, or deeper mud in holes.
Thanks for the tips, used the renaming to get some dust and remove skids, but the depth map is still an issue. My .ter is called Egypt_Desert_0.ter, attached is a zip of the depth map, (I used your highpass filter technique Miura, very nice! Thanks for that tip) if anyone has a chance to take a look at it, that would be great. As far as I know it's exported as an 8bit gray scale, 1024x1024, the same as my height map
I opened the png in Photoshop and it was in Indexed color mode. It should be Grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale). Also, the depth map should be nearly white as darker colors are several meters deep and at least the sand groundmodel can't handle that very well. You can change that with Levels. Try this image. I did the above changes and also inverted it before setting the levels, change it if it's not what you wanted. If it works at all..
That did the trick! I didn't realize I had to change it there and not just export the png as an 8bit, thanks again
