You don’t need thousands of polygons anymore to make good looking landscapes!
You can just bake normalmaps of high-poly ones on very low poly decimated versions.
I didn’t include the high-res mesh in the attachment because it was too heavy. It had about 63000 faces. I baked it on a 288 trianglemesh, in a 512x512 image.
lowpolyglsllandscape.blend (375 KB)
i dont have glsl so i rendered it out isnt that sorta the same. seeing things like this i want glsl even more but ill never get it but anyway looks awesome great example
You’ll get it… it just may be a few years.
Do you have a desktop or a laptop? A video card that supports it can start in like $25
yes… but you can pay 1k for one…
NEVER throw away old comps… I got a new one and the ram was the same kind! So now instead of a new computer with 512 ram I used my old duel 1024 meg ram! My new one has 4 ram slots so I have 2.5 gigs.
Also when computer parts break it’s good to have spare ones around.
i would never throw this comp away even tho its a piece of worthless shit thers something very intriging about it. probly how much money i blew on it and didnt get what i payed for 
it said it had 3 90gig drives not including the 2 dvd slots when two drives have 5 gig and 1 c has only 10 gig only one disk drive is a dvd the graphic card is way expired its like rage fury pro 2000 more like rage fury shit atleast blender works and i have a desktop i hate laptops
That means you can upgrade it, you can get a decent video card for like $70, you can upgrade the motherboard… Anything. And it’s much cheaper than buying a whole new PC, and you can do it little by little.
You can get a good card for under $50 for crying out loud 
Nice landscape BTW, I like it!
Thanks.
Here’s a tutorial for doing a highpoly for baking a normalmap:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Landscape_Modeling_I:_Basic_Terrain
ive got a new comp now. im only 13 and i havnt got shit all money
I just built a new pc. I got a GeForce 9600GT OverClocked 512mb DDR3 graphics card. It was regularly like $140 and I got it for $70. Black friday at frys electronics. XD
valek27:
thats awsome your doing blender at 13! I started at 12 (I’m 15) and I’m sooooo glad I did. Keep it up!
I started 2 months after turning 11 =X
nice. we are such geeks lol
Yes, but at least I don’t look like a geek (not saying you do…)
Yeah I know. That is so true with me to. No one would imagine that I was a geek unless they got to know me pretty well. I’m a skater geek. lol. I skate and I look like a skater but I’m also a geek on the side. ha ha
For me when I bake all I see is either a plane blue or purple UV…
You need GLSL, map the image as NOR, not COL…
I have glsl, the problem is I save the UV layout and hit bake, (with glsl turned on and extra maps on) do I need to apply the map to the material prior to baking? The problem has nothing to do with glsl, it’s the actual baking, I figured out a while ago how to tangent bake on my one computer (without glsl) and it worked fine, but on this comp it just bakes a plane purple image on the UV layout. Suggestions?
upload a file as it is just before you hit bake.
