Originally Posted by
AnKor
SM is "scenery model". Used for auto-gen forests and cities.
CFS3 Terrain SDK (available here in Patches and SDK sticky thread) has mksm.exe tool that converts .m3d into .sm (and you can export m3d in gmax). Its parameters are explained in SDK docs, but I haven't used it and have no idea how it works.
One quirk of my shaders is that they don't support additional texture sheets for auto-gen scenery.
Stock CFS3 and WOFF/WOTR use single texture sheet (called ScenerySheet01.dds in CFS3 and ScenerySheetWWI.dds in WOFF), but SDK hints that there can be more than one. I didn't know it and coded shaders to always use just one texture. Although it seems nobody really tried to add multiple sheets, so I'm not even sure the stock CFS3 renderer supports it.
What it means is that even if you add new objects you can only reuse textures from the existing scenery sheet which seems a bit inconvenient for modding.
Also keep in mind that CFS3 is VERY inefficient when rendering auto-gen objects.
Instead of "instancing" these objects as modern engines do, it clones and transforms them entirely on the CPU and then sends large amounts of data to GPU every time a chunk of scenery goes in or out of view. So if you have a 1000 trees of 100 vertices each you'll get 100,000 vertices to be processed by the CPU. I suspect this is one of main reasons for stuttering (though I haven't thoroughly tested it).
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