I''ve been playing around with d3d8 for a while and am wondering how I would go about creating a Final Fantasy Tactics-style textured terrain if the vertices came from randomly generated heightmaps rather than loading a mesh. I already have the heightmaps loading beautifully, but rendering various textures to it is another matter. I''ve come to a conclusion that the most efficient way of going about this is by generating a single, large texture (perhaps equivalent to a 256x256 pixel texture) in memory from other textures (64x64 pixels each) that “blankets” the terrain so that I don''t have to use multiple passes or alphablending for texturing every frame. My question is how do I go about generating this texture offscreen so that I can call settexture once and have the entire terrain rendered? Is this at all possible? Here are some screenshots from FFT as an example: http://www.neoseeker.com/Games/Products/PSX/finalfantasytactics/screens.html

After doing some more research on this, I came by a pdf document on "Dynamic Texturing" that sounds exactly like what I''m after. But unfortunately for me it uses OpenGL and not direct3d so now I''m wondering if the principles of "off screen rendering" in this document can be applied in direct3d as well.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs224/docs/DynamicTexturing.pdf

Or is there another way to logically apply 10 or more textures to a randomly generated mesh of 33x33 vertices without having to constantly change textures?

Has anyone done any dynamic texturing before? It sounds like a very useful technique.

So basically what you want is an isometric type engine?

It is not going to be isometric since the matrix is able to rotate around the Y-axis.

Here's a picture of what I'm trying to render with 10 or more textures:

http://www.angelfire.com/il/JersMidis/Simple_Mountains.JPG

I know simple landscapes do not need so many textures, but I'm planning on them becoming more and more complex once I figure out how. Multiple passes just make it way too slow so I'd like to know how to create a single texture off screen that would be applied to the entire mesh, or any other method that is just as efficient.

[edited by - Sil on August 13, 2002 6:09:51 PM]