Terrain Editor 2003-11-28 - By steven_mcq
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John and Harvey,
Terrain grids exported by Carrara, even via Amapi, are likely to
make VRML files very, very large. And VRML files are rather bloated,
anyway. Viewpoint technology, now applied to Atmosphere, is more
efficient overall than VRML, but not with hires grids.
Bryce has an adaptive exporter that creates a triangular tesselation
from a grid landscape, at a user-specified resolution (much lower
than the grid resolution). You can imitate that by exporting a
Carrara terrain grid to Amapi and decimating it. A6 decimation will
give you a uniform tesselation and A7 decimation will give you a
weighted decimation. Anything Grooves will give you a weighted grid
when you use the adaptive setting--big rectangles covering low
detail and little squares for the fine detail.
I've done a lot of terrain conversion, and decided as a result of my
research that the best method has yet to be developed. A weighted
tesselation would be good if it recast the mesh instead of trying to
preserve the original grid structure in the detailed areas. A
handmade landscape, created like any other polygon mesh, would be
even better, except that this is hard to do and very hard to make
with accuracy. For example, the cliff face of Half Dome or El
Capitan could be reasonably approximated with relatively few
polygons if handmade. A grid of these features, by contrast,
stretches a high poly count vertically without showing much vertical
detail. But good luck trying to recreate the details accurately in a
handmade model of Yosemite Valley.
I think this is an important issue for anyone who wants to post
landscapes using a web 3D technology. It hasn't really been
addressed optimially.
SMcQ
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