TL;DR: I've bolded my main question Hi, I'm fairly new to Beam.NG while it's been sitting in my library for quite some time. I have to say the product is brilliant, I've spent countless hours messing about and I'm excited for continuous development I've started using the built in world editor; and so far I've found it to be really good. I've just come off a few months working with the Spintires editor, where I got to the point where I could make a fairly enjoyable and quality looking map in fairly small amount of time. So while I am an absolute beginner, I understand some of the concepts behind creating a map. Compared to the incredibly unstable Spintires editor working with the BeamNG editor is an absolute breeze. They're both fairly similar in toolsets, although the fact that BeamNGs is in engine meaning proper draw distance and the ability to instantly drop in to test is a boon. However I wanted to know what was the common and up to date way of creating terrain from scratch. The built in tools are nice for fairly small adjustments, but hand shaping large areas of terrain in the editor is incredibly laborious. It's less of an issue in Spintires due to the smaller map sizes and large brush size. I've done some searching and found a few tutorials here and there, however some of them are apparently out of date and the methods apparently no longer work. So what I would like to know; is there an accepted terrain gen software that easily exports a heightmap in a format that can easily be dropped into the world editor. I'm perfectly willing to learn a new bit of software if the end results work. L3DT looked promising, but the tutorial that was hosted here suggested it was outdated and no longer worked with BeamNG. I don't get much free time around work (infact I'm posting this on my cig break); so before I spend the few hours I have this evening downloading and chasing various bits of software that ultimately don't work, any help or just a point in the right direction will be massively appreciated. PS If I've put this in the wrong section feel free to move it; I somehow only just clocked the Questions Section
Thanks. However I don't think this is quite what I was after, I imagine the Giants Editor isn't too different from BeamNG editor. I'm really after a dedicated terrain gen, that can output heightfields in a format BeamNG can use. I've done a little bit of messing about with L3DT and I think this is what I'm looking for. When I get in from work I'll do a bit of testing with it Although I do have another question unrelated to terrain; how do I go about grabbing a single node/point from a road I've laid down to rearrange it, whenever I select the Road it seems to constantly select the second node for replacement. At the same time is there any easy way to adjust the width on multiple parts of a road.
L3DT is good for heightmaps as is World Machine ( what I prefer ). There are others and as long as they export 16 bit greyscale .png you should be good to go with direct import into Torque.
L3TD worked great. I managed to get a good deal of stuff down over the weekend on the map I was working on, creating my terrain in L3TD, carving the roads out using the bulldozer tool. I even made some new materials for meshes and roads (I was rather proud, it's been maybe 10 years since I did anything like this). I also worked out the road node tools and feel like a doughnut for asking. However I messed something in one of my materials.cs files and then messed stuff up further and ended up losing most of the work I did. While mildly miffed, it's all part of the learning process and I've still got my original heightfield and know roughly where I had stuff. I've decided to start again and do it properly from scratch, adding in assets as I go along hopefully keeping the folders tidy and low sized. And this has thrown up another question that I can't quite find the answer to. Should I have my project folder in mydocuments/beamng or steam/beamng, and similarly where should my assets go? Also is there a brief annotated guide to the materials.cs files? I won't be able to use my PC for a few days, so I'll probably get it with fresh eyes. Cheers
