Making first terrain (map/level) how to do it

hey



I ve read the tutorial on the wiki about making a terrain and what I saw there, was not really a

view of what the terrain would look like. There was more like: I give Heights, and there the mountain will

be placed with the texture (white color) for example. So no real visualization



I am aiming to make this kind of terrain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiEGlAdzF-c



Its pretty big as you can see. Isn’t loading a model a lot easier? Or a plugin where you can make those

height terrains (with height 55 for example).

You cannot form a character out of a heightmap

Alpha-4 which is coming out very soon has a terrain editor with texture and height painting.

Thanks what would be great.



That terrain editor uses these float with heights right? And no models.



Are models really that slow (like the model you saw in the video)?

Yes, models are slow, especially when you want to do collision and deformation.

Thanks for the fast respond.

If models are slow, It might be a new solution to make jMonkey even better to add also texture editor (for making 3d characters with this technique) instead of 3d models for the characters. without the use of images

Heightmaps (and heightfields) are special in the sense that they are axis-aligned and you know what direction is “up”. This makes for very efficient collision algorithms. Models, unfortunately, usually cannot be made out of a heightfield.

Everything you can made up with a deformed quad is possible to optimize like this, for characters there is way easyer way to optimize, Just use one Sphere as coliison(capusle box ect) or a few for the improtant parts (aka hitboxes) instead of doing a triangle exact collision detection.



But a static model ( without deformation) is actually really fast already with jbullet as it makes internal preprocessing to reduce the amount of checks needed,( when deformated these would need to be rebuild however wich will almost certainly lead to hard lags.)