I mentioned earlier about possibly making the effort to learn and acquire a better terrain building softrware.
I mentioned a few things I felt were missing in ES, things that I consider important.
Yes, creating ascent/descent with a flat surface are not accomplised easily using the level tool or ramp tool. It is trial and error process and it can take alot of time, because like clay as you try to fix things in one place it can be messing you up in other places.
How do you create a cliff, an overhang, or cave in the terrain? I cannot per-se do these things. I can do the cave in iclone with primitives or props, but not in the ES.
Yes, ES does accomodate flexibility, which is nice but the flexibility has a price. You cannot dimension or create the kind of symmetry in your development that really speeds up the process. It is like a child with Play Do, you just squeeze and push things around.
I tried to build an airport runway on a 1024 terrain. There is no way to assure you have any room for aircraft on the runway unless you actually place a real spec model on the runway to check it out. That is probably close enough in 90% of situations with 3D models. There is so much we can hide and workaround. You don't even need a real spec model when you can use the scale tool...but alas scaling those characters is a new set of problems.
This may seem remote, but what about pre-constucting a city on the terrain. All you would need is a tool to build box like structures and pull them out of the base. You wouldn't have to place a bunch of buildings on a terrain and waste all those resources, when all you need is a city to fly by. If you had the proper tools you could just wrap building textures around the elevated structures on your terrain. You could use the glow, specular etc,, to build night scenes etc. Think how much easier you could construct your terrains and include a large number things you do now with props. I mean it is pretty amazing what could be done just from the building of a terrain.
What about your roads and paths. If you had proper tools you could just paint the textures directly to the terrain. You could have highways and roads with markings from the textures and not have to place road props into your scenes. You think on that one, because it would be a huge time saver. It is so tedious, the place of road props onto terrain. Looking at a ES terrain it is extremely difficult to know the lay of the land from viewing in ES. Even if you could see changes in the elevations when you bring it into iclone it will change.
Have I said enough to spoil it for everyone? I hope I haven't spoiled it. I am merely speculating on glaring issues for me.
So, things can be done better and they may be more difficult to implement within 3D software. They cannot be ignored, if you progress with your craft.
I don't know Zip about a Bryce, VUE or any terrain builder software. It is strange how all of a sudden you have to do things and you have little or no choice, but to do them. Oops, I realize I don't have a software tools or content to do that.
There are things on the horizon, unseen. I've been in the land of iclone where I get spoon fed things that take me where I want to go with 3d animation, because basically I don't really know how far I can go. LOL
Some of the things I've mentioned should probably ring some bells for many readers. Seriously, an enormous amount of work with our projects can be done at the terrain (image map) level. We need a competent terrain building tool that allows us to go beyond basic ground elevations with the ability to replicate terrain items. By that I mean, if we were building a complex of buildings it would be a huge time saver to just copy and paste them onto the terrain and have them merge with the terrain. I suspect, a scultris or Earth Scultor type of molding/modeling tool is NOT a best final solution.
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Sorry for the long posting. I was thinking about a terrain with a city built into the terrain. It might be possible to take a 3D cad type program (sketchup) and construct the city. Then carefully place the city onto the terrain and merge it with the terrain. Then apply textures, and maps to it. You wouldn't have to have a city of course, but you could think in terms of the application of a large number of props combined within the source program possibly something like sketchup and apply to a terrain. The largest number of content items we use in iclone are props, and they are individually placed.
You could construct a local shopping center, with buildings, automobiles and other prop items alter it as you please with textures. This could save so much time. It would be understood that all your content items in this arrangement would be low-poly and have no construction details, except to accomodate external terxturing.
I rarely get an original idea, so I assume someone has already developed what I am talking about. It is probably just a matter of who has developed it and what it costs.
Yes, conceptually you might build an extremely low poly city with props in Sketchup then use the final compilation. The problem would be having the computer resources to accomplish such a thing separately. There is no way a 3DXchange with current capacity could accomplish such a migration into iclone.
Edited
10 Years Ago by
rampart