an experiment

EmceeMart · Post by **EmceeMart** » Wed Apr 19, 2000 12:29 pm

After visiting Sir James' site and seeing how he came up with the terrain for Popcorn, I was inspired to try a little experiment. One should be able to come up with a terrain bitmap from just about any image once it has been made 256 x 256, greyscale, 8-bit. So I tried it and came up with this:
<IMG SRC="http://members.tripod.com/Emcee4/medusa.gif" border=0>
This is the Traxx terrain map. It makes for some very interesting landscape. With this particular image (I just pasted into Traxx as Terrain Bitmap after copying it to the clipboard from my Paint program) there is an ideal, almost ready made, very large circuit around the edge of the face - though the possibilities are endless! Such as going off the edge of the terrain to rejoin the main cicle at any point, adding bridges, tunnels, ramps and jumps to get to the middle part of the terrain. My head is still buzzin' with ideas for this track if it ever gets finished... I seem to have a backlog of about a dozen or so tracks to finish!

I had thought of using "real" shapes before to generate a landscape but went about it the long way i.e. making hills, valleys, dips and ramps to achieve the shape I wanted (another project put on hold because it was taking too much time)... so this method has really go my creative juices flowing again!

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Keep on Monster Truckin'

EmceeMart

[This message has been edited by EmceeMart (edited 19-04-2000).]

[This message has been edited by EmceeMart (edited 20-04-2000).]

Fatal Error · Post by **Fatal Error** » Thu Apr 20, 2000 12:00 am

I've been sitting here for a week trying to come up with a "new" idea, something different...Emcee and Sir James just solved that for me..thanks guys. I've got about 50,000 photos and clipart to choose from so my brain is also "buzzin"....without the beer and Southern Comfort hehehe cya
FE

p.s. I do this all the time in Bryce 4 but it never occurred to me Traxx could do it.

Fatal Error · Post by **Fatal Error** » Fri Apr 21, 2000 11:43 am

well, I tried this but when I try to run the terrain in MTM2, the colors are screwed...like all white and red...crazy colors. Why is this happening? I used a stock texture for the terrain. I also tried creating custom palette in Traxx but no change.

Post by **Phineus** » Fri Apr 21, 2000 12:06 pm

The most obvious thing would be that maybe there's a naming conflict between your texture and one in a track/truck podded higher in the list. Move your pod to the top of the pod.ini file and see if it's still messed up.

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- Phineus

P.S. remember that the terrain bitmap cannot be a color graphic. It must be a greyscale pic.

[This message has been edited by Phineus (edited 21-04-2000).]

Fatal Error · Post by **Fatal Error** » Fri Apr 21, 2000 12:22 pm

Phineus...you sir are a genius. It was one of the trucks I had podded. I moved the track pod above the other track and truck pods and it WORKED! thanks (omkpylag) = on my knees praising you like a god (lol)

cya
FE

AIR_Wipeout · Post by **AIR_Wipeout** » Fri Jun 16, 2000 2:45 pm

I've done that a million times. I took a wire frame pic of Donkey Kong, and boy, that was interesting.

SIG · Post by **SIG** » Mon Jun 26, 2000 6:10 am

I usually use this insted of random terrain- 1. I think of a landscape eg. mountains + hills.
2. I scribble in the middle with black + white.
3. I blur it for hills.
4. I select an area (feather-2) for mountains and use the pattern or sculpture tools or sometimes just scribble with a soft brush and sharpen the picture for a rocky effect.
5. Where my course will go I select the course area (feather-1) and blur it a lot.
6. I copy and paste everything into traxx and I have a great mountain surrounded by smooth hills with a nice flat course runnig through it which is easy to drive on and fun as you can knock computer trucks off the course on to the rocks and they have some really cool looking crashes especially if you go off too!
TAKE A BREATH!!! UHH!

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Yours Mentally
SIG

[This message has been edited by SIG (edited 26-06-2000).]

REOSPEED · Post by **REOSPEED** » Thu Jun 29, 2000 6:30 pm

I found this neat little proggy called Terragen that i now use to do all my terrain work. I happened to stumble upon this one day and found that i can edit the terrain way better then the random terrain feature in Traxx.If you want a look at it you can get it at: http://members.xoom.com/reosped/teragen.zip