Perhaps I'm not that skilled, but I've tried using paint height to mold terrain by eye, the result was that it was much more time consuming to translate from my mind's eye to the terrain patches & get smooth-looking realistic terrain. Actually I'm surprised that one guy-as a side project- produced a obj. to xmodel_xport converter before a whole community dedicated to mapping & modeling. Then again, I don't know how difficult or time consuming that would be. Still, it's been a year, & even google searching, etc, that Toxec is the only useful result I found. You're also correct that it was my specific intent to find a way to convert a heightmap to a terrain as my intention is to accurately scale maps from another fps franchise. I posted the process as there has been & still is no other that I could find. Correspondence has found it's way to my e-mail inbox letting me know several have found it useful. As it stands, 2 hours to import & mold a sizeable terrain is, for my purposes much faster than paint-height & produces nicer results. The only issue I have with your post- one month later- isn't that you find it personally to time-comsuming, but that you phrase it like you speak for everyone in saying that it's of no valuable use.

i'm sorry, it wasn't my intention to badmouth your tutorial. It's actually very good and detailed. All i do is complaining about the time to spent on your method to get realistic terrain into radiant. I never wanted to criticize you personally.

good news: Daevius will do a "heightmap to .map" converter. But what if you want to turn a blender model / terrain into a heightmap?

Np. Good to hear of another utility being made. As far as turning a terrain into a heightmap: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Creating_a_Heightmap_from_a_Plane

I just started doing the modeling about 7 weeks ago, so when I have a question, I usually find the answer in the Blender wiki. Or google it. You'll also notice that there are most if not all the major file types to which one can export when using blender.

edited on Jan. 4, 2009 01:43 pm by timb0

very nice, thanks

I googled a half hour but no luck with my keywords ;)

Hi.

TOXEC, when made, was created for personal use because I had a few custom models I wanted to import to a map that I've since scrapped.

When I created it, I didn't think to add support for animations but I later decided that I wanted to see custom character models and animation sequences.

So I've started work a while ago on a sister program called AXE (DAE to Xmodel Export) which was supposed to support animations and skeleton structures, etc...

Between my new job and the fact that Blender's DAE exporter plugin is borked and doesn't export animations correctly, I've put AXE in the far reaches of my harddrive to collect virtual dust.

When my current projects are finished and if I see that there is still an interest in it, I will finish AXE and release it (adding support for other file formats as well such as .x)

~Brandon "Silicone_Milk" Haston

When the choice is between paying thousands of dollars for Maya or using a free utility made by you or anyone else, I'm sure there will still be interest whenver any other useful import utility is produced.

edited on Jan. 5, 2009 01:22 am by timb0

by the way new version of toxec.

You don't have to manually edit the .xmodel_export file to fix the missing space issue.

The inverted normals bug should now be fixed.

Download:
http://files.filefront.com/TOXECv02zip/;12875854;/fileinfo.html

Any news from that tool to convert heightmap to .map ? :)

Tam

i'm already on vacation but Daevius has one college week left ;)

we paused our development due to lack of time, but also 'cause we encountered two serious problems with BSP decompiling.

1st: there are degenerated brushes and brushes with duplicate faces in the BSP, which cause Radiant to crash when loading the reconstucted .MAP

2nd: terrain and curve meshes translate to triangle lists. we haven't found a way yet to recover proper mesh quads. we might have to use a heightmap app to re-generate meshes, so stay tuned.

dead???....

I hope not cuz these are some really interesting programs and i hope there will be some fruit to bear from their trees of dedication :)

if there has been please let me know....