Quote from: gregtee on September 18, 2013, 09:15:15 PM
I was wondering if there's a way to take the obj export from Maya and somehow in TG generate a heightfield from it. I could then disregard the obj and just work on the heightfield as I would any other TG asset.
Yeah, this is certainly possible. In Maya (I used Max to do this), make an orthographic camera looking straight down. Render a square image (such as 1,000 pxls x 1000 pxls), with either the Zdepth properly synched, or else use a black-white gradient map on your mountain mapped to the vertical direction. Then you've got a grayscale height map. Save it in EXR!! You need the 32-bit depth to get a good terrain.
Then in TG3, use the imagemap as a heightfield generator. No need to import the OBJ at all.
The quality of your final TG3 mountain depends on
1) the smoothness of the geometry in Maya (with a large exr image map, you will actually see the individual facets of the OBJ if the OBJ is not decimated enough;
2) the size of the rendered image (bigger is better, with obvious limits as the exr becomes absurdly large;
3) the size of the patch in the Compute Terrain node.
Matt