Normals don't seem quite right on this Terrain

Troubleshooting General Help
1

I’m using FaultFractalHeightMap, and I’m using TerrainPage.



This simply doesn’t look very smooth to me. I think the normals for the heightmaps are messed up in jME  :roll:



2

Hm… I think this has to do with smoothing. Perhapse a smoothing functionality needs to be added to the AbstractHeightMap.

3
appel said:

I'm using FaultFractalHeightMap, and I'm using TerrainPage.

This simply doesn't look very smooth to me. I think the normals for the heightmaps are messed up in jME
4

terrain normals aren't the best part in jme, but they're not really the cause of that effect.

the effect usually appears because of the terrain values being in a small the range (like [0 - 255])

FaultFractalHeightMap by default "normalizes" the generated values in the range of 0 - 255 (which imho should not happen).



you'll get much better results with 16 bit raw images.



http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=4039.0

5

Yes, and that default (255) can be changed with NORMALIZE_RANGE. Not really a very clean API eh? But I hacked it in cause other users had the same problem.

6

is there a reason why the default value is 255?

7

Thanks, I got it working.

8
sfera said:

is there a reason why the default value is 255?


No clue, but changing it changes the scale if I recall correctly, so that broke some examples. I just made it into a static field instead of hardcoded at the time.
9

as far as i can tell it breaks HillHeightMap and MidPointHeightMap.

but i see no reason for that normalizeTerrain(float[][]) method to be used in FaultFractalHeightMap.