Long time terragen user, a beginner question [With screenshots] !

[Profane]

Hello there you wizards of this program. I have the most basic question which i couldn't find the answer to because of my limited English.

[Gyazo links are screenshots, completely safe to open.]
I'm using Terragen 3.2 on Windows 7 machine.

I found out about TerreSculptor program while browsing these forums. It's a mighty fine tool, and i have created a basic terrain with some erosion and whatnot. [Screenshot]
http://gyazo.com/8bc0efcee7427b7eb800055664f32aa1

Now when i want to import this to terragen, i export the file as .ter file, then do the following in terragen : Terrain tab -> Add terrain -> Heightfield (load file) and i'll browse the file i just created.

Boom, the terrain is added [tho super flat] and i feel like the height of my planet has doubled.
http://gyazo.com/9b786599c101c42d36b10c1897321ba4

Now, i understand that i can make it look better with displacement -> height multiplier, that's how it's meant to be done right ? [or is there a better way?]
http://gyazo.com/96e63f470f5e07f6de49649db2a88dc7

Now after all these steps, my planet is wonky, everything is hazy and just plain ugly. I have tried doodling with the atmopshere settings to make it look normal but nothing helps.
http://gyazo.com/218c9590065d8cdc48329c1ac3688b2c

So i suppose my question here stands: What am i doing wrong ? What could i do better ? There are _obviously_ mistakes that i am making, so all help would be appreciated. I am super new to "exporting" terrains to terragen. Never really have i used an external program with terragen to begin with.

Everyone who takes the time to help a newbie, big thank you ! I'll be reading and replying to everything.
All tips in general are welcome and appreciated !

Sorry if my grammar makes it hard to understand my problem, just ask and i'll provide more information if needed. 

[Dune]

Welcome to the forum, Profane. It looks good, so I don't really see any problem. If your ter covers a really big area, that might get you the haze. Is it scaled right?

[bobbystahr]

I've found that even a 513 ter created in TerreSculptor comes in bloody huge (130,000m square) and has to be displaced in the negative to show up. You have to zoom way out to see the full bounding box of the imported ter. I don't fully understand TerreSculptor either as I've not had a lot of time to play around lately. Best read up on export from TerreSculptor's options is my suggestion; if you have the time. I displaced it -10 in the screen grab

[bobbystahr]

And to echo Dune, welcome to the forum.

[Profane]

Welcome to the forum, Profane. It looks good, so I don't really see any problem. If your ter covers a really big area, that might get you the haze. Is it scaled right?

Everything comes out so big and over scaled. My oceans start at 4000 altitude etc.
Is there a way to fix the scaling in any way ? Is this done in Terragen or in Terresculptor ?

I could easily live with the weird numbers [altitude mainly], but the weird haze decreases the visibility of the mountains so much at these altitudes that it's impossible to render a sharp scene.

http://gyazo.com/7c182e78fe23b341163559fcd7a351a3 here is a screenshot of the haze.

I've found that even a 513 ter created in TerreSculptor comes in bloody huge (130,000m square) and has to be displaced in the negative to show up. You have to zoom way out to see the full bounding box of the imported ter. I don't fully understand TerreSculptor either as I've not had a lot of time to play around lately. Best read up on export from TerreSculptor's options is my suggestion; if you have the time. I displaced it -10 in the screen grab

Hmm interesting. Are there any "negative" effects from displacing it with negative values ?

Also thanks to both of you from warm welcomes ^^ !

[bobbystahr]

You can scale it in the terrain editor tab by clicking the Add Operator and selecting Heightfield resize and it will automatically make it 10k in size. when loading a heightfield unless you are tiling it, it's a good idea to turn off Stichable border in the Heightfield Load and also to get rid of edges use the border blending.  Attached is a full size terrain render and no anomalies occur but it's crazt figuring ought the heights of water and were to limit the textures. Way huge scales sometimes in the negative as well. Some large Fakestones as well, 10m for reference.

[Oshyan]

The haze is a result of the size of your terrain. Really long view distances over large terrains naturally should have more haze (think of looking from the top of a very tall mountain into the distance - everything fades away in the haze).

The problem here seems to be that TerreSculptor doesn't export TER files with correct scaling values. I created a 2048x2048 terrain and it came in 261 km to a side! That's *huge*, it's about the length of the entire coastline of Washington State in the US. Not only does this make things hazy, but it also messes up the relative slope of things since the heights get stretched over a larger area and thus appear less steep and dramatic (quite flat, in fact).

Fortunately the solution is quite simple, although not exact. Just go to the Terrain Layout, then select your Heightfield Shader in the Node List on the left, and click the Add Operator button at the bottom of the Node List. Select Heightfield Resize from the list of options. Now go to the settings of the Heightfield Resize, make sure Re-size In Metres is checked (and not Re-sample Pixels), and then adjust the values for the Resize in Metres. It defaults to 10,000, but I found about 40,000 (for both sides, since it's square) looked good. Note that you want to keep Re-Scale Vertical *unchecked* because the vertical scale appears to come in more or less correctly, it's just the horizontal scales that are messed up.

I did actually notice that even the vertical scales may be a bit odd, with both positive and negative displacement in my case, but that may just be how I created by simple test terrain. I would assume the vertical heights are correct, at least to start. You can always add a Heightfield Adjust Vertical to experiment with that later. But I don't think you'll ever want to use the Re-Scale Vertical checkbox in the Heightfield Resize because you'll just end up with the same flat look to your terrain as you had originally, and with no additional control to decide just how high it should be (which the Heightfield Adjust Vertical gives you).

Edit: Ah, Bobby beat me to it.

- Oshyan

[bobbystahr]

When I resized it I had the Fakestones layer turned off and after relocating the textures I turned it back on the stones were nearly as big as the mountains....

[bobbystahr]

Edit: Ah, Bobby beat me to it.

- Oshyan

a first, hee hee hee. Had my oatmeal and blueberries this morning.

[Oshyan]

P.S. It looks like Terresculptor has a decent terrain scale read-out that I didn't see before, it's at the bottom of the terrain edit window (W[idth], L[ength], A[ltiude]). You can also go to Tools->View Heightmap Statistics.

It indicates the default terrain at 1024x1024 pixels is 2.62km. So it seems it just gets scaled up by a factor of 100. The terrain looked rather extreme when I rescaled it to that size, but the height values may also be incorrect. The height values I see here show a 350m total range, which is much different than what I see in TG. So I think you just need to rescale both area and height (2 different operators in TG) to match the Terresculptor values, assuming you want to see your terrain as you saw it in Terresculptor.

Any frequent users of Terresculptor should contact the developer and request fixes to the .TER export as these values are all supported in the format and should be correctly converted across if the exporter is handling things correctly. TER is intended to allow easy data exchange, so the terrains *should* just come right in looking correct.

- Oshyan

[bobbystahr]

P.S. It looks like Terresculptor has a decent terrain scale read-out that I didn't see before, it's at the bottom of the terrain edit window (W[idth], L[ength], A[ltiude]). You can also go to Tools->View Heightmap Statistics.

It indicates the default terrain at 1024x1024 pixels is 2.62km. So it seems it just gets scaled up by a factor of 100. The terrain looked rather extreme when I rescaled it to that size, but the height values may also be incorrect. The height values I see here show a 350m total range, which is much different than what I see in TG. So I think you just need to rescale both area and height (2 different operators in TG) to match the Terresculptor values, assuming you want to see your terrain as you saw it in Terresculptor.

Any frequent users of Terresculptor should contact the developer and request fixes to the .TER export as these values are all supported in the format and should be correctly converted across if the exporter is handling things correctly. TER is intended to allow easy data exchange, so the terrains *should* just come right in looking correct.

- Oshyan

Fab man...totally missed that as well. Must learn to put my glasses on when using a new app.

[bobbystahr]

Good plan Oshyan, I'll do that now. Write the good folks at terresculptor that is.

[bobbystahr]

Found this info in the pdf I dl'd when I got TS:
Terrain Size
Professional Edition: TerreSculptor supports a maximum world size of 1M × 1M × 1M (1048576 × 1048576 × 1048576) generic units, although terrain meshes twice this size can still be created or edited but may result in renderer distance clipping. This is equivalent to a 20.97km × 20.97km area when using the Units settings of 1 unit = 2 cm.
Standard Edition: TerreSculptor supports a maximum world size of 256k × 256k × 256k (131072 × 131072 × 131072) generic units This is equivalent to a 5.24km × 5.24km area when using the Units settings of 1 unit = 2 cm.
This maximum world size is independent of the heightmap resolution, such that a 2048 × 2048 heightmap with a Units XZ vertex spacing of 128 will result in a 256k × 256k area, while the same 2048 × 2048 heightmap with a Units XZ vertex spacing of 256 will result in a 512k × 512k area.
The Units XZ vertex spacing value determines the size of each terrain quad, along with the terrain heightmap resolution in pixels ultimately determining the total area of the terrain mesh. The total area is calculated as heightmap resolution × Units XZ vertex spacing along each dimension. Choosing the most effective set of values for heightmap resolution and vertex spacing is required to obtain the best balance between terrain detail and rendering performance.
In most cases the Units XZ vertex spacing will be 128, 192, or 256, which provide a good balance between quad size and terrain mesh density. The heightmap resolution will then be chosen to fulfill the requirement for the overall terrain size such as the area in meters or kilometers.
Care should be exercised when choosing heightmaps larger than 1024 × 1024 for both performance and file size reasons: a 2048 × 2048 heightmap is 8MB of heightmap data and a terrain mesh of 8 million triangles; a 3072 × 3072 heightmap is 18MB of heightmap data and a terrain mesh of 18 million triangles; and a 4096 × 4096 heightmap is 32MB of heightmap data and a terrain mesh of 32 million triangles.

[Oshyan]

It's good that it supports a customizable "pixel spacing" or relative area value. Terragen and the .TER format do as well, but it seems like his TER export doesn't properly encode that data. Should be an easy fix.

- Oshyan

[bobbystahr]

Depending on which version of terragen he got his specs from maybe? But I don't think that stuff has changed as I regularly load old 'classic' .ter files.