I once upon a time got Bryce 3D for free as they were doing those crazy offerings before releasing new versions, so I have this 7.1 Pro which I stumbled upon as searching other old stuff. Bryce3d is terrain generator, it renders pretty generated terrains, but also I can export height maps out from it, maximum size is 4096. My simplistic brain says that I could use this to create height maps to be used in BeamNG map making, am I wrong here? I think I also saw option to export terrain mesh. You can also paint and edit in addition to use numerous options for automatically generating these height maps, software then creates mesh from height map, I can also import height maps, meshes and there are other stuff too, objects, trees etc. Terrain mesh in Blender (3ds format used), this has under 8000 polys, but I can adjust that to even 1 000 000 polys, also it creates and exports textures. Is this usable at all, can such heightmap be used or has terrain mesh any use of? I'm not sure if I could import terrain mesh to Bryce3D and make heightmap out from that, it might be possible, just haven't ever used that Bryce3D, but had to post about this as with my tiny knowledge this tool could be useful?
As long as it exports as a 16 bit greyscale heightmap, with a power of 2 (ie. 512x512, 1024x1024, etc.) then it should be able to be imported into the game
I can export PNG or TIFF images that both result 24bits in color, those won't do? It allows to export also to USGS dem file as well as numerous 3d file formats, including dae. 3DS format is one that is not shown up there, not sure if any of those could allow way to get 16bit heightmap to be made? With Gimp, I could convert that to 16bits, but I'm not sure if it then 8bits of greys converted to 16bits which really would be just 8bits, or if there is more than 8bits available, based on Irfan view's count colors function, it might be just 8bits of greys as there was only 255 colors. But when exporting from gimp to 16bits I get very spikey terrain. I could not get .dae opened in Blender, but I can always use some other export format, 3ds seems to work, but not sure if Blender could render 16bit grayscale. This is what I got when I just imported the height map: Funny how high elevation value I had to use, also Bryce did create textures for it, but it should of been yellow at highest point, I used auto paint and it painted four yellow areas for lower ground. I can't use these tools at all. Another way to use might be to use mesh and use adjust to mesh functionality, but I don't know if that makes much sense, if one has to manually paint every meter.
I believe Torque3D will only accept 16 bit grayscale Yeah not sure if converting it to 16 bits would be a viable option.. But blender does have the ability to render to the right kind of heightmap, I've never tried it myself, but you could have to look at B25Mitch's tutorial on that explains more how to do it, or one of LJFHutch's.
It seems to take in those 24bit (really 8bit) images and that kinda works, but of course there is only 256 levels of height, while 16bits has something like 65000 levels, which really is needed to get any smooth terrain made. Exporting a mesh and doing it in way shown by those tutorials you linked, is then probably only way to go, but that does not look so horrible bad solution. 500 000 tris seems to make Blender lag a bit, so maybe I try little lower number, however looks like Bryce can be used to generate terrains for the game.
I haven't had much time to play with this, but thx, I did test QGis, there seem to be bit of learning curve, so need to search bit about parameters, to get exporting work correctly. It might be that exporting a mesh, importing that to QGis and then exporting height map works even if Bryce does not export more than 8bit grayscale. Need to play more of that when I have time. My interest would be mostly creating kind of offroading terrains to just drive around, something done very quickly without much editing, but if it would be possible to generate height maps easily, it might be useful for someone else.
