PnP TerrainCreator - Forum

Hello all,
I have been trying out the CE version for several weeks. And PnP is the best terrain editor I have found.
I'm currently trying to use it for creating terrains for game developement. But have had little success in creating optimal meshes.
My problem is that the poly count on the exported meshes are extremely high. It makes for nice terrains but it's too much. Is there a way to control how many poly i have to work with????
I currently use T.Ed and get meshes around 8000 polys, but the same thing in PnP is like 100,000 polys.
And advice is appreciated. Once, I get this running in an acceptable poly count, I'll be buying a seat.

Welcome, and thanks for your nice words.

Currently there is only one option, by which you can control the poly count. This is the "sector detail size" on the terrain properties dialog. If you use smaller sector sizes like 256, you can still create large sectors by using a larger "Detail element size" (on the terrain properties dialog too), of let's say 3 or 4 which is the horizontal distance between two vertices in meters.

Another way to reduce the poly count of a single mesh is to divide a whole sector into smaller patches during export. So the overall poly count stays the same, but the single meshes are much smaller, which can improve rendering performance if you can cull big portions of a whole sector.

When exporting, the terrain mesh is created from a regular grid. So there is currently no vertex reduction implemented. I had it on my list for the last release, but unfortunately I didn't had enough time to finish it. So it is on the todo list for the next release.

Lastly, until we have a built in vertex reduction, you could perform it on the exported terrain meshes. I don't know a tool which can do this, but the theory of this is known for some time, so I'm sure there is a number of tools out there, which can do this job.

Hello

As far i know there's a possible way to reduce a mesh
with blender.
Here's some information about the
poly reducer script

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/ ... ng_Scripts

well,
I found a nice way to kill the poly counts. I use Max for modeling.
After I import the 3ds meshes, and join some of the meshes together to build a 2x2 quad. I can apply an Optimize modifier. It takes a 110,000 poly terrain, and brings it down to about 10,000 polys.
I bought a license today. and I gotta say, this is the best terrain editor I has used so far. Keep up the good work.

Thank you very much.

As you will usually export the terrain into several meshes, the biggest problem during poly reduction, is to avoid cracks between the single terrain patches. To avoid this, they have to be connected somehow.

I'm currently working on importing the whole terrain at once and improving the static object interaction. Poly reduction will then be the next point on my todo list.

Is an internal polygon reducer still in the works in case we wish to use meshes and not hmp files.

The polygon reducer is already available since version 1.2 for all mesh export formats.

A powerful polygon reducer is VizUp. It is reliable and offers a great amount of control for poly reduction. I know it handles obj and 3ds. not sure about other formats.

If you export a heightmap into more than one mesh file, you have to ensure that the transition between meshes has no cracks. External poly reducer utilities are usually not able to handle this correctly. The built-in poly reducer of PnP can do this.