Torque3D and Ogre3D terrain system comparison

I am about to start making a serious map for BeamNG, after Badlands Rally for RoR, and I wanted to ask experienced Torque3D terrain creators what does this engine have, that Ogre3D doesn't, in terrain editing and the opposite.

For example, I have made a terrain in World Machine and I need to use blendmaps for textures and not just manual brushing. Can I do that with Torque3D? And how? Also can I use grayscale images for vegetation density? And lastly, can I use an overlay colour image to blend with the detail textures? Ogre has all these features, except for the last one, in the new terrain system.

 

Ok ill start backwards... There is a whole bunch of different options for detailing textures and what not. You can use your own textures or use textures from the game. Yes there is overlay. Also, using a manual brush is (in my opinion) alot easier to use and lets you add A TON more detail than you could with whatever a blend map is. I'm not totally sure what a blend map is... could you explain that to me?

The vegetation has already gotten an overhaul in a huge update coming in about 7 days. It will look REALLY REALLY amazing. It looked really good before anyway. I don't think making the vegetation any denser would even matter because you can just pack trees and bushes and what not and it will look plenty dense... or the opposite.

 

The ground material works in a slightly different way to Ogre's system, but most likely you'll get a better result.

You can import blendmaps with the heightmap in Torque editor. Not sure if there's a limit to how many layers you can have. One pixel on the heightmap can have only one ground type, so mixing materials doesn't work. Make the channels in the blendmaps black and white, no shades of grey. You can import the blendmaps as RGB, RGBA or as individual black and white images for each layer.

Diffuse texture for each layer works a bit like color overlay in RoR, if you set the texture scale to same as map size in meters.

Detail and macro textures should be mid-grey on average since they fade away in the distance and the main color for the terrain is in the diffuse textures. Detail texture (and a matching normal map) is usually best at a few meters scale, while macro texture adds detail to mid-range distances with tens to hundreds of meters texture scale. Also helps to reduce texture tiling.

There's no vegetation density map feature like in RoR, but you can set ground cover per layer. Works best for grass, maybe small bushes or rocks that don't need collision or shadows. Ground cover can use both meshes and simple sprites. Forests have to be placed manually, but I think the forest brush tool is so easy to use that it doesn't matter. Just don't go overboard with the number of trees.

Ground model properties like grip and particles come from the layer material name. See the official maps for example and lua\groundmodel.lua for the available names.

For map size, 4096 pixel heightmap/blendmaps still works, may cause problems for older computers. 2048 may be better if you're going to add lots of stuff on the map. You can scale the map to any size when importing (or afterwards) with the "meters per pixel" value. I wouldn't recommend larger than 4 km or so, even at that size you start to get z-fighting, flickering between meshes.

Just ask if you have any more questions. Looking forward to the map.

 

Thank you for your help. I can see now what differencies there are. But this system is so confusing to use. I haven't managed to make my own terrain from scratch yet, no matter how many tutorials I see or experiments I try. I also get errors while importing the heightmap, like the max height is not working correctly, and also having weird problems with the texture maps. Could a find a really detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to make my own terrain for BeamNG using heightmap and texture map import?

EDIT: Also, I have some questions:
1)What is the macro texture and its use?
2)How can I make changes to the size of the map layers afterwards? I noticed there were no such options available after I imported the heightmap.
3)In the layer tab, some textures I assign are just pure white. Mabye because they are png and not dds?

 

Torque editor is not very logical in some things, takes a while to get used to it. What errors are you getting?

Heightmap and blendmaps should be all same size, in powers of two. So, 2048 for example, instead of 2049 like in RoR.

1) Macro texture is basically like another detail texture that has different scaling, or an overlay texture. Setting the same texture for macro and detail often works for a start. Try 100 m size and 1-2 km distance for the macro texture, and not too much strength or it will look bad up close.

2) Not sure what you mean.. squareSize in the terrain object changes the meters per pixel value, physical size of the whole terrain. Or you can edit the texture scales in Terrain Painter (F3).

3) PNG should work too. I haven't made a map from scratch without a template in a while, so I don't remember where it puts new terrain materials. Maybe in the common art folder. That's one of the strange things about the editor, it doesn't tell where the material is. Could be best to quit the game, make a materials.cs in your map folder and put the terrain materials there in a text editor.

 

2)Sorry, there was a mistake here. What I wanted to say is that I can't use the same options I use before I import (max height, meters per pixel, layer options). But I think your answer is pretty much what I wanted to know, thanks.

3)Mistake again, I wanted to write jpg. Alright, I will try converting to dds or png and see if they work.

 

Things seems to be working much better now that I started to get used to the editor.

Another question I have after messing with materials, how can I assign groundmodels? For example, I want dirt to behave like dirt, not just look like it. I remember you could do that in RoR.

 

The ground model relates to the name of a terrain paint.

There are a number of different ground models. The full list can be found in Beamng.drive/lua/goundmodel

 

I completely forgot that Miura also told me about the groundmodel file:

But, I didn't know that the name triggers the groundmodel. Kinda thought about it, but didn't take my thought seriously. Thanks Ouerbacker!