Terrain Making Beginner

Hi,

I have been learning direct x for a while now so that I could make a quick 3d game (its taking me longer than I thought ofcourse).

Right now I'm at the stage of loading a world/level/terrain. So not knowing where to start, I made a fairly large terrain in bryce (cus its really quick and easy) and gave it a high res texture (something above 4000 X 4000 res) and exported it as a .X mesh file. So my first problem arose...My game (with just the quick bryce plain loaded) is taking 29 megs of ram. and I noticed the texture I chose took about 49 megs of space (which I guess that means its taking 49 megs of video space?).

So my question is whats the best/easiest method for terrain generation..I like what i'm doing cus I can build the terrains before hand but it seems very inefficient and it doesnt even look good.

thanx in advance,
Boomba

$20 says you don't actually need all of that terrain in memory at any given time. Try only loading what you need, as (or right before) you need it. Also, scale down the texture sizes.

you might want to concider GMax for making your 3d items for your game.

smaller poly models use far less ram.
and it's specifically designed for making game models, animations and characters.

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I made a fairly large terrain in bryce (cus its really quick and easy) and gave it a high res texture (something above 4000 X 4000 res)

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If you were using OpenGL, the card probably wouldn't allow you to load that large of a texture. I don't think D3D will let you either if you load it with the POOL_DEFAULT option. Just something to keep in mind.

Making a terrain by hand isn't all that uncommon, but I usually ask an artist to do that for me, and then yell at him/her when the poly density is higher than I told them. Not too loudly though. Your only other option would be real time generation. Throw a whole bunch of math at the card telling it to plot points along the way, and you're ready to go!

I believe if you were using OpenGL, you could've used a 3D modeler to make your terrain. I believe Blender allows you to import graphics and such into OpenGL, but i'm not sure. I don't know if there is a modeler that would allow you to do that with direct x, but if their was that would be the best. :D

Sentral, you seem confused. The only way to "import" a model "into opengl" is to write (or use) a file loader for whatever file format you choose. Then write a render routine to render the data you've read in from the file. There is no "import model" command. Direct X has loading of .X files as part of its libraries.

Yes, I don't know what you are talking about :D . I never did anything with graphics just yet. I just heard that from somebody, I guess I misunderstood. Just trying to help out, maybe I shouldn't help out with graphics, if I never even did anything with them. ;) HAHA.

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Originally Posted by skorman00

Your only other option would be real time generation. Throw a whole bunch of math at the card telling it to plot points along the way, and you're ready to go!

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thanx alot for your help guys...I think I'm gonna try the method of real time generating. But I have had alot of trouble finding a tutorial or article that will help me start terrain denerating with direct 3d. Does anyone know of a site or point me int he right direction for a beginner?

thanx in advance,