Questions regarding the usage of imported terrains

[Xpleet]

Hi everyone,

I just have a question about working with imported terrains.
I have yet not worked with TG²
I sort of posted a similiar thread in the wrong board so here it goes:


1. Let's say i import my terrain and want to look sort of above my mountains, where you could see the borders of the imported terrain alraedy. Is it possible to make out of the 1 imported terrain a kind of endless process so you atleast have a fake horizon?

2. Let's say i want to zoom in to my imported terrain very much, kind of where the details would go blurry already. Could i make TG² enhance the quality of an imported terrain that you would only notice if you would raelly zoom in, but kind of keeping the shape of your bigger original structures from the terrain? Like TG² enhancement when looking from man's view but fullscale imported terrain look in birds view.
A sort of displacement mapping that you would only notice if you would come really close to the ground... know what i mean?

3. How well does the planetary system work with imported terrains? Does it work at all? Is it suggested?

[bigben]

1: Yes. you can specify the amount (width) of blending between the terrain file and the rest of the terrain. Matching elevations can be tricky though.

2: If you enable fractal detail (enabled by default) on the loaded terrain you will have procedural detail added to the terrain.

3: You can use medium resolution data of Mars to texture an entire planet, but there's nothing like this available for earth data yet. It is possible to produce very large composite terrains with selected areas of high resolution detail, but this has a theoretical maximum of only one hemisphere.

e.g. <http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2409.0
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2502.0
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2519.0

[cajomi]

to 1:
If you use for the surrounding background the TG2 build in terrains, you just have to match it to get the general look near to  the imported terrain and you can render as "infinite" world. The blending of the borders of the imported terrain works in general really good. So if your the pov is from inside the imported terrain you will see no borders.

to 2:
TG2 adds "infinite" details to an imported terrain. Only with very high slopes (above 80 degree) you'll get problems, but this applies at time for all terrain renderers.

to 3:
You can not map an imported terrain around a planet (like it was in tg 0.9).

Take a look at the images of Phylloxera. He shows here a lot of renders with imported terrains.