16-Bit Heightmaps?

[TheJamsh]

For some reason the version of ODL1 winter on BZScrap deosn't export 16-bit heightmaps, it always exports 8-bit in png format.

Does anybody have a version that actually exports the proper 16-bit format heightmaps?

[General BlackDragon]

In a manner of speaking...


I just uploaded this, it's a replacement for Winter made by Nitroxis. It can do everything Winter can do, and then some. It might be able to do 16bit? Though I think it does it in RAW format.

http://www.bzscrap.org/downloads/Utilit ... Editor.zip

[MrTwosheds]

Not sure what difference you think it will actually make. Crudity is guaranteed by BZ2's enormous terrain squares. 8 bit is accurate enough as far as height is concerned.
Assuming you need 16 bit heightmaps, then photoshop, stylize, diffuse, anisotropic and fade *% might produce a nice variable smoothing effect when converting them.

[Commando]

I thought N1 had created a newer version of winter.

[MrTwosheds]

What I am trying to point out is that BZ2 is not going to deliver a greater height resolution even if it did export a 16 bit height map.
Photoshop conversion is the best way to improve the resolution and control the result in whatever you use the height map for.
Its much like the upscaling of textures, extra detail needs to be added somehow.

[TheJamsh]

Basically the reason is I'm importing them into UE4, but they're coming in really 'steppy' in terms of height, which is a bit of a bum. I can smooth everything out but you loose the definition then.. not a huge deal since i'll prolly redo them anyway, but would make my life easier :p

[MrTwosheds]

I guess UE4 terrain in much more detailed, you need to figure out how to reproduce the map at the right size and then how many terrain vertex are replacing 1 from bz2, then you will at least know what size blur to apply to it. I found diffuse, anisotropic very useful for working on up scaled textures, it doesn't have a size control but retains the black/white level extremes quite well. Might look completely weird as a height map though.

[TheJamsh]

Yeah my process is pretty convoluted so far... biggest problem I have is that UE works in Centimeters (bloody fps's) - so first thing I do is scale the height-map image up by 1000% to transform each pixel in a one-by-one meter unit.

The NEXT issue, is that most of the BZ maps are 8-meters to a grid space, so I then need to scale the landscape in UE up to 80%. For some bizarre reason, the height appears to be correct around 25%. I just used screenshots and similarly-sized objects to scale them up. It's funny how TINY BZ2 maps are actually, especially when there's no fog-of-war in front of you, everything seems to claustrophobic yet somehow BZ pulls it off.

But yeah either way, as with all things, there's no easy conversion process to get BZ2 terrain into UE :p I just checked out the utility GBD posted - it seems to be able to export .raw 16-bit format... I think UE imports that. I'll try mu luck and see what happens...

[Nielk1]

I just adjusted Nitroxis's to know how to read the few parts of the TER he didn't have yet. I don't think that stuff ever got completed.

He and I like to look at reverse engineering game formats.

I actually have done some stuff in the BZ1 zone when it comes to maps, I could probably grab the code to Nitroxis's editor again and finalize it. His memory model for the TER sort of irks me though because it doesn't use have a cluster array but instead has to deal with point clustering during TER generation.

I was thinking of making a BZ1 to BZ2 converter that tried to find the best way to do the texture maps given the very different nature of BZ1 and BZ2.