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| Jabberwocky |
 Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 10:34 pm Post subject: Ogre3D |
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Joined: 04 Mar 2008
Posts: 6
Location: Canada
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Hi,
I found a link to Grome through a gamedev article.
I've searched the forums, and apparently support for Ogre3D is planned some time in the future. I have some questions about this:
* What form would this support take - a new SceneManager?
* Would Ogre3d support include the "terrain slopes" texturing feature?
* Would Ogre3D support include some kind of paging or "swap system"?
* Is this support planned for any time soon?
I would be very interested in using Grome under Ogre3D, if this kind of support were provided.
Thanks,
-Jabberwocky |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 7:25 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hello,
Yes, indeed, there is Ogre support planned for the future.
I don't think we will have the necessary resources to implement a new scene manager (not at first anyway). We've currently successfully imported Grome terrain in PLSM2, but the current solution is not yet stable and user friendly to consider releasing it. One of disadvantages of PLSM2 is that you need to use one single color texture, so either had to use one color layer in Grome or burn (collapse) the existing layers into one.
We also have some community members successfully using Grome terrain with basic terrain manager support with multipass rendering using a custom material. You can find more here:
http://www.mmoworkshop.com/trac/mom/phpbb?page=weblog_entry.php&e=55
We are currently investigating with what scene manager to go. We are looking at PLSM2, SimplePagedTerrain and stock terrain manager. Any suggestion is welcomed.
About the terrain slopes (I think you are referring to custom mapping of terrain textures), this feature presence depends on the terrain manager we choose (PLSM2 for example cannot support that).
Paging also depends on the terrain manager (PLSM2 has paging built in).
The support is currently under way. We cannot give an exact date, all depends on our choices and the difficulties we have with scene managers. I suspect that a month is resonable period to estimate now.
Any help from Ogre community is welcomed (suggestions, sample implementations etc).
Regards,
Adrian L.
Grome Development Programmer
Quad Software |
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| Guest |
| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:09 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the answers.
You're right, choice of target SceneManager is a difficult choice.
The default Ogre TerrainSceneManager is probably easiest, but wouldn't be able to make use of many of the cool features of a Grome-generated terrain.
I'll spend some time playing around with the Grome demo, and thinking about the SceneManager candidates, then post back here. |
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| Jabberwocky |
| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 10:10 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Mar 2008
Posts: 6
Location: Canada
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(Oops, last response was me - forgot to login).
_________________
The Salvation Prophecy
Space Combat. Planet Exploration. Strategic Domination. |
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| CalebLJ |
| Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2008 5:33 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 23 Aug 2007
Posts: 13
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| Ogre support would be amazing. |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 5:34 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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The new version 1.2 of Grome comes with a new export plugin (called Global Large Data Sets export) which is capable of saving the terrain heightmap and textures to 16 bit RAW, PNG and JPG images. It can be easily used to export Grome terrain for some Ogre scene managers (like PLSM2). More information regarding Ogre export procedures (some examples) in the next days.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| greedo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 12:44 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Mar 2007
Posts: 41
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We are eagerly waiting!  |
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| greedo |
| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 3:53 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Mar 2007
Posts: 41
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 5:36 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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For Ogre there is the problem that there are so many terrain managers around. And to make things more complicated all are used, some users use simple stock terrain, some PLSM2 etc.
For many there is already the possibility to export data from Grome (using either text exporter or the Global data sets exporter). All you need to save is raw for geometry and either individual textures and masks for layers or one big texture for the entire terrain.
So for multilayer support, the export support is already there, but the Ogre users should make at least the effort to write some materials for the engine to render the layers. One example is here:
http://www.mmoworkshop.com/trac/mom/phpbb?page=weblog_entry.php&e=55
For one "big texture on the entire terrain approach" the problem is that there is no layers collapsing in Grome. This shouldn't be done in Grome anyway (as the collapsed texture resolution needs to be big and Grome could not represent it) but at export time. We already adding collapsing support at export time for another project, but the finish date is in about 2 months.
On the other hand I don't recommend this approach unless you are using some sort of megatexture shading. For games, one big texture (with one detailed texture above) is simple not enough (resolution is too low) unless you have some smart paging system (which Ogre doesn't have) to bring in and out of memory very big textures.
So I recommend to use multi layer approach and create special shaders to render them in Grome. You have all the information about Grome layers in the SDK documentation. The actual shader is very much dependent on your game approach. To give you an example, the project presented here:
http://www.quadsoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=249
even though it is not using Ogre the shading is pretty much the same. They are using 6 layers of detail + one lightmap rendered in one single pass. You can download the demo and see the shaders code. This is a good example how to setup multilayering for latest video cards (8 textures per pass).
In the end we may offer some Ogre demo (how to use Grome terrain in Ogre) but this would be only to show that this is possible. As I said many Ogre users are using different terrain managers so most probably this demo would not be useful to them.
If you have any questions with the shader we will be more than happy to help you. |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2008 5:37 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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| Ohh, the first link don't work anymore. You can contact the author of that product from the site (http://www.mmoworkshop.com/). He done some multilayering shading for Ogre. I'm sure he would be happy to help you. |
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| Sparticus |
| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 6:02 am Post subject: Ogre3D Integration |
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Joined: 09 Apr 2008
Posts: 52
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| What techniques should I use to export into the Ogre3D PLSM2 or terrain scene managers? Will the next version of Grome include any new Ogre3D specific features? |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 7:08 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi,
First you need to export the heightmap and images from Grome. Heightmap is saved in 16bit RAW format. You need to create one big RAW for the entire map (you can use either General Large Data Sets Exporter or the Simple Text Exporter). For the images you can use either one big image (called image paging) or the splatting method (you can combine up to 4 png images). I’ve tried only image paging. For this you need to create the Grome terrain using only one color layer (use ColorBrush and ColorGen tools) because there is no texture collapse yet in Grome (this functionality will be added in Grome 1.3 SDK). So for now the texture resolution may be low for this method. To export the color image you can use the General Large Data Sets exporter (to create one PNG image).
So after export (heightmap as RAW and one color texture as PNG) you need to use Ogre Map Splitter tool. This will take the raw and png and create smaller images to be used when loading and rendering the terrain. You need to create a special cfg file to be used by map splitter (refer to Ogre documentation and examples for the syntax).
After splitting you end up with multiple png files (some are for heightmap and some for the color). Put those into a terrain map folder and use it with the PSM2_runner from Ogre. Again you will have to modify the main runner cfg to indicate the folder to be used as terrain map. Also you need to create a cfg file for the terrain map (refer to the runner documentation for details). If you are using the single color approach you need to indicate TextureFormat=ImagePaging in the cfg file. If you are using texture splatting you need to indicate the splatting textures (something like: SplatFilename0=splatting_sand.png SplatFilename1=splatting_grass.png …). Refer to the runner examples to see how the cfg are constructed. When you execute the PLSM2 runner it should now load and render your terrain files.
Let me know how the progress goes. I’ve only test it with image paging (only one color image) method. The next version of Grome will allow you to bake (combine) the terrain texture layers at any resolution you want.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| greedo |
| Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 12:30 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 04 Mar 2007
Posts: 41
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 12:35 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi, Greedo
Version 1.3 will come out at the end of September (in around 1 month). It will contain the texture splatting (baking) you need to create big, high resolution images to be used with PLSM2. By default it will save very large images to geotiff but you can modify the plugins (or create new ones) to export to jpg, png and other formats that contain huge images.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| Hornsj2 |
| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2008 7:24 pm Post subject: Baking? |
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Joined: 24 Mar 2008
Posts: 16
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Hi,
I have been tinkering with Ogre3d lately and would very much like to see texture baking. Has this version come out? I noticed this topic is a little old.
Thanks,
Hornsj2 |
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