What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating Virtual Landscapes, looks at the concept of map storage in games, limitations imposed by 3D technology, and starting a new GROME project.

Chapter 2, GROME Workspace, walks us through the major parts of the user interface that we will be using through the rest of the book. Then we begin the process of creating “zones” which are the basic components of a terrain.

Chapter 3, Heightmaps, looks at the bulk of the tools used for modeling heightmaps; using brush and automatic procedural techniques combined. We round this off with a look at using masks to protect regions from modification. This also contains the obligatory “Hello World” example, but in heightmap form.

Chapter 4, Textures and Lighting, covers using textures and masks combined to blend different layers together. We also look at flowmaps, automatic mask generation, filters, shadow maps, and light maps. Additionally, we look at color baking for squashing multiple texture layers into one, for mobile support and normal maps.

Chapter 5, Bring Me a Shrubbery, explores the special support for vegetation using billboards and instances of 3D objects. Ground details greatly enhance a scene, as hardware becomes more powerful, more details can be added. Ground cover can be generated procedurally to create huge areas of ground detail.

Chapter 6, Water, River, and Roads, walks us through the water toolset, creating multiple water layers, material properties, adding shorelines, and creating roads using the spline tools.

Chapter 7, Exporting to Unity, UDK, and Ogre 3D, helps us export basic terrains using several techniques for Unity3D. Then we cover a 3D mesh export for UDK as a basic ground layer. Then finally we use the Graphite exporter which creates near 100 percent compatible GROME scenes when using the GromeOgre source code.