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You're reading from  Grome Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK, and Unity3D

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2013
Reading LevelIntermediate
Publisher
ISBN-139781849699396
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Richard A. Hawley
Richard A. Hawley
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Richard A. Hawley

Richard Hawley started programming in the early 1980s at the start of the home computer craze with the Sinclair ZX-81. Before leaving high school he had worked on three game projects for Assassin Software and later worked on conversions of classic strategy board games for 8- to 16-bit machines. He went on to develop end-user tools for popular flight simulations including Empire Interactives Enemy Engaged helicopter series and the highly successful Origin Janes Longbow series (MissioneerPlus). Hes the director of Tricubic Studios, a small UK company dedicated to creating simulation and training environments using off-the-shelf 3D engines including Unity and Leadwerks. Together with technical artist David Hopkinson (Total War: English Civil War conversion) and physics guru Fred Naar (creator of Helicopter Total Realism for Microsoft Flight Simulator X) they are collectively known for their work on helicopter simulations.
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Unity


By far the easiest of the three engines to use and can build games for PC, Mac, and mobile platforms. Unity comes with its own terrain system however this isn't available in the Unity iPhone/Android editor. This is simply because mobile platforms can't (yet) render the hundreds of thousands of polygons that typically constitute landscapes on their larger desktop counterparts.

In spite of this limitation, Unity iPhone/Android has been partly addressed by including a simple terrain system for mobiles, GROME still has this well in hand through its use of Mesh layers.

Mesh layers are 3D models based on the terrain heightmap exported in Collada (.dae) format. We can export our terrain with enough detail for a target mobile device or for PlayStation, XBOX, and PC. We can do this for multiple levels of detail (LOD). For desktops we can simply use the heightmap from GROME and load it into the Unity editor so we can use all of the native Unity terrain tools for painting and vegetation. This...

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Grome Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK, and Unity3D
Published in: Feb 2013Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781849699396

Author (1)

author image
Richard A. Hawley

Richard Hawley started programming in the early 1980s at the start of the home computer craze with the Sinclair ZX-81. Before leaving high school he had worked on three game projects for Assassin Software and later worked on conversions of classic strategy board games for 8- to 16-bit machines. He went on to develop end-user tools for popular flight simulations including Empire Interactives Enemy Engaged helicopter series and the highly successful Origin Janes Longbow series (MissioneerPlus). Hes the director of Tricubic Studios, a small UK company dedicated to creating simulation and training environments using off-the-shelf 3D engines including Unity and Leadwerks. Together with technical artist David Hopkinson (Total War: English Civil War conversion) and physics guru Fred Naar (creator of Helicopter Total Realism for Microsoft Flight Simulator X) they are collectively known for their work on helicopter simulations.
Read more about Richard A. Hawley