blender crash - decimate modifier

Support Basics & Interface
1

hi everybody,

I searched for that problem but couldn’t find it so I guess I’ll have to ask… I’m a complete blender noob and only use it right now to generate terrain out of heightmaps to use it for a enemy territory quakewars map. I drew this heightmap by hand and then modified it in world machine - the result:
http://www.saltyballz.com/qwmapping/rockfinal_worldmachine_standard_output.bmp
I use this map in blender according to a tutorial ( http://www.globaldefenseforce.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6 ) and generate that mesh:
http://www.saltyballz.com/qwmapping/blender_crash.jpg

there’s a thread on my problem at the quakewars forums where other people tried to make it work too:
http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20088&page=2

basically I’m doing:
start up blender, erase the initial cube
add - mesh - grid, 128*128 -ok
F5, add new…, F6
texture window: Add New -> clicking on “none” (texture type), selecting image (my heightmap)
clicking on the extend button
F9
add noise until I think it looks right

from there I try to add the decimate modifier. I set it to 0.5 and try to press apply but normally I can’t even do that, as soon as I set the 0.5 blender doesn’t respond anymore. I tried this with 2.44 and 2.45, tried several grid resolutions too. In our discussion at the etqw community we found out that the big flat surface parts seems to be the problem, as soon as I add a lot of noise to those parts I can do the decimate.
while that’s something I could do it isn’t really a solution to my problem, I made that heightmap with the fact in mind that I could decimate the tris count considerable like that, the map basically consists of 2 island, the rest is the ocean floor…

thanks for every help and sorry if this problem is some known issue, I couldn’t find anything about it yet…
Salty

2

Hmmm… well your right it does crash (it hangs on my machine), but there’s a much more modern way of doing this anyways:

  1. Add your grid
  2. Add a material and load your image into a texture
  3. Go back to edit buttons (F9) and add a ‘Displace’ Modifier to the plane. Set the ‘Tex:’ field to your image (copy the name of the texture containing the image into that slot).
  4. Add a decimate modifier. Set it to whatever you like (0.5, perhaps).
  5. Enjoy (you may want to supply)

If you need more detailed instructions let me know.

3

whatever the reason - it worked with that way - decimated to 25% after using the displacement modifier

http://www.saltyballz.com/qwmapping/decimated_terrain_small.jpg

forTe, thanks a lot with sugar on top!
Salty