Now heres a question...

[Rassilon]

I bet will stump most....How would I use fractural texturing to morph a mesh to contour it...In other words take a sphere and using the texture as a sort of additive...morph the sphere using spectural values from the texture...to produce a sort of landscape upon its surface...

Or is such a thing possible in studio MAX?

[abiogenesis]

Sounds like a displacement map. Celestia currently doesn't support them. Maybe Chris is working on it? Maybe ther's a good reason he isn't? Eh, Chris?

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

[Rassilon]

Yes your correct it is a displacement map of sorts...but I want to completely do this in MAX then add to Celestia. To produce something like I did with jax and svartos models but using a relief map to give the mesh a rugged surface...so the textures fit the areas of elevation...

[abiogenesis]

Oh. I'm sure it's possible in MAX. It's just another type of map to add to your material. I took a class on 3D Studio at school, and we used a displacement map to generate a mountainous landscape. Had to make the map in paint... for some reason we each had a copy of 3D Studio, but the class had to share a copy of Photoshop. Anyway, I don't remember if MAX calls it a 'displacement map' or a 'height map', but either of those should do the same thing. Maybe I'll see if I can get a copy of MAX again and find out exactly what it's called. I don't start classes again until September, though...

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

[Rassilon]

That would be cool...But your help set me on the right track...atleast I know what to look for now

[chris]

Not sure how to do it in MAX, but . . .

The .cms files actually describe a fractal noise-based displacement map on a sphere. It's a bit too limited to be that useful right now. In the future, I'd like to add a form of noise-based displacement mapping that's calculated on the fly in order to make it easy to populate an asteroid belt with a variety of different shaped objects.

--Chris

[Rassilon]

Yeah ive done some searching and found an abundance of resourcres on it...just not the right one yet...

maybe the use of relief maps to make surface his and lows would be good enough as a beginning...fractural landscaping I think it is...Thats got to be a pain to code in though...

[Guest]

It sounds like all you need is a fractal texture generator. Lots of those around. Have it generate a greyscale fractal image for your height map. Then you can colorize it as you wish and use it for the regular texture map as well. That colorization step can be as simple or as complicated as you wish. You could do it manually, or write a program to do it for you.

What I would do is run a threshold on the greyscale height map to flatten out everything below a desired "water level". That'll create oceans and lakes and such. Save off a 2-color version of this for a specular map, then go in and change the different shades of grey to shades of green. Maybe make the highest points white. You could lower the "ice cap" height near the top and bottom of the image to create, well, ice caps.

The results would be pretty cool, I would imagine. 3D terrain without bumpmapping. Although adding a bumpmap on top of it all would look nice too...

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

[abiogenesis]

abiogenesis is spelled A - B - I - O - G - E - N - E - S - I - S, not A - N - O - N - Y - M - O - U - S. Just thought I'd point that out.

[Redfish]

I'd love to see that option available in celestia.

Some new cards on the graphics market(Ati 9700) support this feature.

And in Max it's called displacement. I believe you could simply load a map in greyscale and use that to make a 3d terrain. Cannot remember where it was. But know that it wasn't that hard. Maybe with lofting something, or creating a 3d thing.


Difference is that bump maps make something "look" like it had depth.

Displacement maps actually give something depth!

[abiogenesis]

It is that simple in MAX. A Displacement Map is just one of the many maps you can add to a material. Just like a Bump Map. Add the material to a sphere and, voila, 3D terrain on a sphere. No lofting necessary .

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

[Rassilon]

Im going to be trying it tonight...The thing is will this be permanent or does this only appear so in MAX when you render...Guess I'll find out soon enough Thanks all for your help...I should be able to get this figured out now...

Now in Celestia I wish models could be made double sided with only the facing side illuminated where the opposing side will look the same as the outer surface...thereby assigning a transparent sphere a transparency or alpha cloud layer...It seems the actual cloud layer in Celestia morphs to the shape of its surroundings so the clouds appear to overlay the mountains in a way...That is if you follow me lol...well lets say it looks cheesy

[abiogenesis]

... Unless it was a Space Warp.... Man, I wish I still had a copy of MAX...

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

[Rassilon]

Well I figured it out...Its not hard at all just a bit tricky getting it mapped correctly to view in Celestia....To do this you must use the Displace modifier...and treselate to produce the best look with triangles instead of squares by default...

I wont be doing the earth until later when Chris may or may not fix the cloud and atmosphere incompatability with models...

http://cybermindtraveller.freewebspace.com/celestia/earthdisp.jpg

But other than that this opens up a whole new world in planet modeling

[Rassilon]

Heres a bit of bad news about 3ds format...At a certain face count per object it cannot exceed a 64k face value...which is 65535 polies or faces...So when the time comes to get serious about adding models...is there a way to import MAX files in openGL?