Since the site''s been down for a few days, I have no way to find this out on there, so I''ll ask it here. First off, does Power Render support quad-faced models. And if not, would we be able to add support for quad-faced models, along with support for Maya and Lightwave formats? Our lead 3D artist uses Maya, which supports quad-faced models, but there doesn''t seem to be a way to export to the Power Render format. Second, I''ve been having problems with the bump mapping on the water. If I am flying in the air, the water becomes distorted. I don''t know if this is from the shadows, or my graphics card, but I have an ATI Radeon 64mb, which is supposed to support bump-mapped water. Anyone know what''s wrong? Finally, how large can you make the world? The game we are developing is going to be very large, and was wondering just how big we can make each one of these levels in Landscape Studio. Would we have to make multiple levels and put them together, or can we just make one large map? Thank you for your help. -William Phelps Lead Developer of The After http://www.netemp.net/after/

PR only supports triangles. Before you import into PR you''ll need to subdivide the geometry into triangles (ie using the Triple function in Lightwave).

Maya isn''t directly supported, but you may be able to export or convert to a .3DS file and import that. Lightwave 6.5 .LWO and .LWS is now supported.

I don''t know what you mean about the water. Send me a screen capture so I can see what it looks like. Bump mapped water is pretty much useless right now until I get it working on other cards too. Radeon is the only one that can show it correctly.

The terrain texture size is fixed to 2048x2048, but you can change how many polygons are used by changing the heightfield size. If you want to maintain a suitable amount of texture detail you''ll want to split a large world into different areas.
You can also use this to your advantage by making totally different environments for each level. For instance you could have alternating day/night levels as you progress through the game. You can make it switch between outdoor and BSP levels. For instance you enter a dungeon, and if you make it to the other side you''re in a completely new outdoor environment. Dividing your world like this will make the game run faster and easier to maintain and expand.

Ok here are four shots I took inside the landscape studio showing me moving forward and the bump mapped water underneath.

http://www.netemp.net/after/bump1.jpg
http://www.netemp.net/after/bump2.jpg
http://www.netemp.net/after/bump3.jpg
http://www.netemp.net/after/bump4.jpg

If you look at the bottom left, you''ll see a large dark shadow form as I move forward, and then on the last one, it is disappearing. This happens any time I move forward at any height. I don''t know if it''s the shadows affecting the bump mapping of the water or not because I have tried raising the water above all the terrain and it still does this.

-William Phelps
Lead Developer of The After
http://www.netemp.net/after/

One thing you can do is make your bump texture solid white. This will give you a perfect reflection without any rippling so you can see what that is better.

I think it''s part of the landscape being drawn. One problem with the reflections is you can see objects that are below the water in the reflection image. It''s best if you place the water plane close to 0 rather than halfway up your heightfield so hardly anything is below the water.

Another solution would be to use a stencil buffer operation to clip but I haven''t tried it.

Chris