T2 - Terrain Texture Creation IntroductionAfter reading some articles on texture rendering at flipcode (RIP) I decided to experiment with the ideas presented and also create a graphical interface to easily test them on. This resulted in the first version of my program. I was surprised by the interest in the program and so after gathering suggestions from a lot of users and listing all the new things I wanted in a texture generation program I created T2. LatestVista Build - 26th February 2009T2 has been rebuilt to work correctly on Vista. It now stores all data in the user’s documents folder (this is required by Vista). It has also been completely rebuilt using the latest libraries. The new Vista version comes with Pack 1 as standard. You can download it here: T2 Download Pack 1 is now Free! - 27th January 2007T2 is currently being rewritten to run on Vista and to include a new interface. Meanwhile you can download the data pack 1 for free. Please visit the T2 Packs page. New Version 1.41 - 2nd January 2006A new version of T2 is available for download. This version has minor changes only: - Export to .obj and .3ds now takes the mesh view scale values into account and factors them into the vertex positions. Note that the .x file export already included scaling and camera position using a matrix.
- All code rebuilt using the latest Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 compiler. This has resulted in processing speed gains and stability improvements.
- Bug fix: there was a very rare crash when exporting to 3ds when a graphic filename was too big
- Improvements to camera movement code for faster machines
AMD 64 bit version of T2 - 8th October 2005I have finished porting T2 to run in 64 bits on the AMD 64 processor. If you have a 64 bit AMD machine you will see some quite considerable speed improvements. New Version 1.40 - 5th September 2005This is a major release of T2 with some new functionality and minor bug fixes. Unless there are serious bugs this release will be the last for a few months (my real job is getting busy again). The main changes since the last major release (1.30) are shown below. I have placed a copy of the T2 Help system online. Many of the additions below link to the relevant help system page where you can read more. - Facing input control added - allows the influence of an input be controlled by the direction of the terrain.
- Heat map view added for heightmaps (the real name for this is Hypsometric Tint).
- Export system reworked and new export to Wavefront .obj format added
- Normalise lighting functionality improved
- Skyboxes added
- You can now ‘walk’ on the terrain
- Help System updated and also now available online: T2 Help
- The first T2 Pack released - 100 textures + many new projects, materials and heightmaps.
  
To download T2 please visit the download page. To view screenshots please see the Screenshots below and to see the files output by T2 see Files Generated by T2. Pack 1 Released - 11th August 2005I have finished the first add on pack for T2. It comes with 100 Textures, 35 Heightmaps, 36 T2 Projects, 14 T2 Materials and 11 T2 Bumpmaps. Some screenshots from the pack can be seen below:
Details about the new pack can be found on the T2 Packs page. I am charging a small fee for this pack and hope this will help raise funds to continue the development of T2. Huygens Probe images from Titan - 15th January 2005I thought to try the Huygens probe images in T2. If you want to have a go yourself (and walk around on Titan) see this page here: Huygens T2 included in a bookGreg Snook's book "Real-time 3D terrain engines using C++ and DirectX9" includes an (old) version of T2. This is a great book for anyone interested in real-time terrain engine programming. For those who have the book I advise you to upgrade to the latest version of T2 available here (the one on the book is a rather old version). Click below to go to the relevant amazon page for the book:   (UK), (USA), (CA),  (DE)
If you are interested in other games books I have written some reviews of my favourites on the resources page. Files Generated by T2To download T2 please visit the Download page. Below you can see the three files generated by T2 for the bleak.tgp project, the first is the raw output, the second the light map and the third is the two blended together. The images are generated from a 256 by 256 height map and a number of input textures. The snow has a blue tint in the light map because it uses a material with a blue emissive light.   
This next image is a screen shot of the mesh view area of T2 where you can move around a world generated from the output textures and height map ScreenshotsClick to see larger pictures. | 
