Augmenting 2d maps for game engines

[ArtbyV]

Does anymore on here have any experience with taking drawn 3d maps into an engine like Unreal or Unity and adding tessellation or normal maps to make them pop and look more 3d? I've checked on some of the major 3d sites and couldn't find anything. Was wondering if anyone here has any experience with it.

[Robbie]

Do you mean to make the map into a playable level? If so, then that's what I'm doing for my challenge entry: https://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=35001

I can explain my workflow for getting the walls extruded from the 2d map if you like?

Also, I moved your thread to the new level design subforum Thanks for giving me a thread to make it not empty I may need to do some moving around of things from the 3d modeling sub forum.

[Redrobes]

The way I am led to believe it works (or at least used to work) is that the terrain for 3D game engines is done with super high res textures and loads of texture maps to make it look great then they capture that set up and render out some maps which "bake" in most of the texturing into one map and at the same time the high definition 3D ness of it is extracted out and the underlying polygonal mesh is simplified and the normal maps are applied back to them so that it appears as tho the high resolution terrain is there again but this time with much less work on the graphics engine.

Some of the newer engines compute the terrain now on the fly using the graphics processor by having a huge and complex shader running. The shader takes data from textures as before but its not so much now about absolute colour maps and normal maps but data maps that are injected into the shader and used as a basis to generate the terrain. The one I am most familiar with for that is Outerra which is very cool and since free to play with go have a look. But the program to convert your 3D terrain into the data maps to drive its engine is not released and you would have to speak with Cameni over on the boards there.

I dont have personal experience with unity etc. I believe the avenue you need to head down is via Blender because I believe it has that normal map extraction built into it. Not 100% sure of that but I think so.

BTW: Robbie - if you click that link then your no longer logged in. We must fix the www issue.

[ArtbyV]

Sort of. I'm creating this for an actual game, but what I'm actually doing is trying to just take a flat 2d map and add some effects to it in a 3d engine so it looks more 3d.

I've seen it in a lot of games, but Fire Emblem is the only one I can currently think of. Here are a couple of screen shots:

fe_awakening_kampf-support.png

Fire-Emblem-Awakening-1.jpg

The trees and such are either sprites or actual 3d models. What I'm most concerned with is getting the contours of the ground to pop up. Like the mountains and such.

I'm sure a lot of companies do this using tessellation. Do see what it is and what I mean, take a look at this video. Fast forward to 2:30 to see how it makes a smooth sphere "look" 3d. I want to take the same principal and use it on a flat 3d map to pull up hills, mountains, and such.

I'm fine on the 3d modeling end of things, thanks. If you need anyone to bounce ideas off of, I'm happy to help. Making a 3d model of your map actually wouldn't be that difficult.

[Redrobes]

I get what your asking about now. Thats the dynamic tessellation with displacement mapping from a texture. Actually getting the texture to make it do that job is going to be a challenge without a 3D object scanner. I have a 3D scanner and I did a map for one of the monthly challenges years and years ago (yikes Aug 2008 maybe...) where I just manually subdivided up a mesh and displacement mapped it. But this is where it looks at the displacement map and auto tessellates it based on the differences needed.

I'll see if I can get a link to my challenge map but your issue is going to be getting the displacement map I think.

EDIT: Ahh it was this one but not may pictures being loaded now...
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=3079

Yanked the old plasticene model photo from the backup drive...
ModelReal.jpg

Laser scanned into height map - grey values not correct until you click on it. Something about GIMP again...
Height.png

Then you use that to displace a high res mesh. I think thats what your asking about. I think the guys who make games do a lot of great high detail 3D modelling and extract this height map from the model and apply it to a lower res poly model so its more dynamically displaced but thats not really necessary for what your requiring.

[ArtbyV]

Is the first pic a flat plane and the texture raises it up? If so, I didn't realize tessellation was around that long ago... But yeah, that's basically what I'm trying to do.

I've tried doing it in Crazybump to extract the height map, but it doesn't come out right. I would just manually make the height map using NDO in the Quixel Suite, but they don't make it for Mac. Doing it manually is just a real pain. Plus, I need to finish my map style first so I have something to test it on more.

[waldronate]

If you're doing a tile-based system as shown in the example screenshots, you would presumably have a material map for the overall level that specifies which tile to use at each pixel of the material map. You could then use a similarly-sized height map to store the "up" coordinate offset to push the corner height values around. As long as you don't go too extreme in the offsets, you wouldn't need to worry about texture stretch too much. You can do a fetch and add in the vertex shader for the displacement of the tile geometry. You can even tessellate things if you don't just want straight polygonal tiles, but a nice bump map (used as a parallax bump map) or even a basic normal map can spice up the interiors without resorting to tessellation.

[ArtbyV]

It actually isn't tile based. They want hand drawn maps. There is a grid built into the game, but it is basically just an overlay. Tiles would definitely be easier, but I'm not the designer/programmer.

This thread popped up on Google search and was kinda what I was after: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=22049

The game is using a flat map with tokens on it and is in a 3/4 perspective so a normal map wasn't looking right. I should try with a parallax bump map.

Here's the flat map I did today quick that I'm doing some testing on.

maptest.jpg

[ArtbyV]

So I've done a lot of tessellation tests and I just couldn't get it to work right. I think I'm just going to stick with normal mapping. Here's the map "in game".

tumblr_inline_obsy4hQyli1u9l30m_500.jpg

EDIT: Normally mapping here was just done quick with Crazy Bump which didn't produce great results. I need to do some more work there. I'm thinking the Quixel Suite–specifically NDO–would work good for this.

Here's a post on the game for anyone that is interested: http://knightmayorllc.tumblr.com

[Katto]

Sorry, but don't understand the problem and I've read the thread a few times. Call me stupid.
You just need to draw a heightmap of the map you want to use and add the trees as separate props.
I don't know Unity or Unreal engine, but from the linked video it seems like it is the same as with every other 3D package.
Here is a Wilbur heightmap quickie: