Smack My Forehead moment.

[JayRay]

You ever have one of those moments where you are completely set on doing a game a certain way with a certain map style, and you battle with that way for weeks, months even. Finally in frustration, you say "GAH! I'll do it this way..." and then as you get started in that new method all of a sudden the otehr method becomes perfectly clear?

Welcome to my life.

So here's what's going to happen going forward. I have found a fairly good Axonometric renderer for my landforms but was having major issues in making sure my textures were right, not fuzzy, having my detail textures, normal maps, lighting and everything else working correctly, and finally it hit me that my renderer itself was causing me grief by not rendering my map in the proper render settings.

I was having issues with 3ds Max (great program definitely buy it if you can) but when I rendered my 3d landforms, I found that no matter how good I made sure that my textures looked, I could never get my 3ds max renderer to render the landform and only the landform in exactly the same size as I needed it for my map. There was anti-aliasing issues, borders, you name it, it was not working right.

Then I found Area To Render and Blowup in 3ds Max... By Editing the region I was able to ensure that the image I saw was actually the one being used, and if I rendered the map correctly, I would get ONLY the map at the size I wanted...

So for instance... I wanted a map that was 2048x2048 pixels. Using this method, I was able to use my 3d landscape editor to create the proper map, export its lightmap, colormap, and even detail maps as materials correctly, add them to my plane in 3ds max, and when it came time to render them with the Parallel Perspective I could render them without fault... Then back to Photoshop for just a few painting issues here and there. What I got was ultimately a good render.

With my perspective map however, to render a 2048x2048 map I needed to actually have it be that same 2048 wide and maybe 2048/1792 tall... Once I get my exact angles mapped out, and and all landscapes are capable for me to work with. I can also use 3ds Max to add in my other rendered items for complex scenes.

If this fails, I still have another source that while still shows perspective as true perspective, I may be able to set it in a way that with the camera far enough from the items, and a large enough rendering size, that I could still create prerenders for this game...


I WILL NOT BE DEFEATED ! RAH!