Creating sand dunes

[Bamus]

Hey people!

I recently picked up Torque again, after being occupied with less interesting things for a while. I've taken it upon myself to create a desert level, but I'm having difficulties creating convincing sand dunes. The editor tools aren't really suited (or I'm failing horribly at using them) and I can't seem to find any heightmaps online. Lots of areal pictures everywhere but those don't work as heightmaps because of the shadowing.

Would anyone have any good resources, a usable height map or some tricks I can use in the editor to create that Sahara-feel I'm looking for?

Thanks!

B

[Duion]

You will need a terrain generator that will put out fitting heightmaps for you, the Torque tools are not very good at painting large realistic landscapes.

I used http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/ for my first terrains, it is not as good as professional software, but it is free and enough for simple projects.

[buckmaster]

This might help?

[Bamus]

Thanks for the suggestions! I own L3TD (bought it back in the TGEA days) but it's not that suited either in creating the swooping-formed-by-wind look. I'm trying some other terrain generation tools now to see if anything gets close.

This link has some good info: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=22086

Cheers!

[Duion]

Yes, you probably will need a more advanced tool for that, but I think you can get very far with just hand painting and applying some erosion.

[buckmaster]

Oh wow, the screenshot in that link is really nice. I'd love to see if you get something like that working! Though those smooth ridgelines on hieghtmap terrain seem... unlikely. Either way, this is just the sort of thing that the Deathball and Mars demos need for their terrains :D