thanks for trying out three-landscape

[nwpointer]

Hope this isn't weird but just wanted to say thanks for trying out the module!

Was wondering if you had any feedback or questions about the project

[aaronsantiago]

Hey! Appreciate you reaching out. One big thing is--are you planning on making breaking changes to the API again? I like the new API actually---before I had to mess with the internals to enable shadows for the terrain.

Some other thoughts

• Looking forward to progressive textures! There's a relatively long load time for the terrains and it'd be nice to have something on screen ASAP.
• I find the documentation around splatmaps lacking--IIRC it was sensitive to filetypes and it was unclear what the options to the normal/diffuse maps did. In your example on the repo there are 6 arguments to diffuse maps but 3 arguments to normal maps.
• I'm using WorldCreator, and I noticed there are some maps that aren't supported: displacement maps for textures and AO maps specifically. AO seems like it'd help a good bit, though of course I'm not sure how that works with three.js' materials.
• Something that would be really nice would be to auto generate collision objects for use-cannon! There are examples in there for heightmaps.
• A pie in the sky feature I can think of is a way to scatter objects onto terrain--maybe the api could be like getHeight(terrainX,terrainY) (in world coordinates?) and something like getBounds to figure out where the terrain is. Or maybe getWorldPosition(terrainX,terrainY) in terrain coordinates.

This is great work though, so thank you! Components like three-landscape really push r3f well past what you can feasibly do with vanilla three.js

[nwpointer]

Thats awesome feedback!

Sorry about the api change :) I think the new material based api is the way forward and should be considered stable. User feedback may inform some renaming / structuring of props but maintaining backwards compatibility for that kinda thing is possible.

Documentation is something I definitely want to make improvements to for sure. I might build out a dedicated documentation site at some point but to start I think it probably needs additional examples and more rigorous type information for each of the args.

(Regarding the count difference you saw, that was an attempt to show that normal maps are not required for each texture type - ie it's ok it grass for example lacks a normal map.)

You mentioned the material was sensitive to file types - what file types were causing problems?

Applying displacement maps for individual texture types is a really interesting problem! It requires that the density of the mesh be higher in order to capture the detail in the displacement maps which can cause performance issues. Trying to figure out if I can adaptively increase the mesh density near the camera to solve this problem.

Love the pie in the sky feature, its definitely coming soon

Created issues to track those feature ideas:

• https://github.com/nwpointer/three-landscape/issues/14
• https://github.com/nwpointer/three-landscape/issues/15
• https://github.com/nwpointer/three-landscape/issues/16
• https://github.com/nwpointer/three-landscape/issues/13
• https://github.com/nwpointer/three-landscape/issues/12

Thanks again for your feedback, much appreciated!