With 3D-Coat you can paint a normal map onto the body. Alternatively you can create a "height" map and run that through a normal map texture generator.
Though, the normal way is to sculpt the muscles and then bake a normal map.

Thanks, pretty much improvements

 
Wow, already looks amazing!! Do you have a game idea in mind or are you just playing?

The blending texture must be created with a painting program i guess. Blender supports stencil textures to "paint" terrain in realtime but only one channel (one blending-texture per layer), not the packed R-G-B style described below. Its also possible to auto-generate a blending texture based on the slope/normal and height of the terrain.

No there was no LOD, the terrain layer meshes were used for blending the borders by using the alpha color of the outer vertices, invisible polygons on a layer were removed for the layer mesh. So there were several unique independent meshes that made the whole terrain. If you use a texture for blending the layers and a single terrain mesh, LOD should be doable like in a normal terrain.

Here is the basic layout for multilayer terrain with a shader (LOD-able, fast on decent Hardware):

- Lets say you have a single terrain mesh, and you have 3 layer textures you want to blend into the terrain.
- You also have one blending texture with RGB channels. The R part is for blending layer 1, B is for 2, and C is for 3.
- The blending texture must be UV mapped / stretched to the whole terrain. The layer textures use this UV coordinates but multiply/scale it in the shader to tile more than once.
- Assign the textures to the texture channels of the hardware, both the layer and the blending textures. This takes 4 texture channels in this example.
- Now use a shader to blend the layer textures. This is realy simple shader that just combines the layer textures based on the blending texture and scale the UV for the layer textures.

I haven't used that myself tho.

Thanks
This is made in C/C++ and OpenGL but it can definately be developed with Java+jPCT. Do you know "Tribal Trouble" its also developed in Java.

I wrote a fancy editor but first i used stencil maps to build the meshes. However, there are several methods, some are shader driven using only one mesh others draw the terrain several times. I was developing with a AMD K2 350MHz and a TNT2 so i had to optimize a lot, drawing the mesh more than once was not possible so i had to cut out invisible parts of the layers/meshes.

Multilayer terrain only means that you usually draw the terrain several times or in layers instead of stretching or tiling one texture over the whole mesh. You can use stencils, alphas, shaders or meshes to render the layers. This really depends on what you try to do.

You may also take a look at Megatexturing and you will probably need quadtree culling.

If you need a editor depends mostly on how many terrains, levels, worlds you want to create, you hopefully do not try to make a MMORPG so i guess you dont need a editor.

Here is a image of my multi-layer terrain and world editor, was probably a waste of time (except for learning purpose):
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/543

Edit: Here is also a video of the "game"...:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe0DCrOG0WQ

Yes, sort of. Do a search on "Multilayer Terrain".

Probably the game uses multiple meshes for the terrain. Think of a tile based map in 3D. Each tile type/image has its own mesh. The fading effect are tiles that have zero alpha at the borders.

Look at this screenshot: *Removed*
There you can see the "tiles" and the faded borders.

Thanks for the quick answer.
Yes, i use Blender and can easily bake the lightmap into the diffuse texture with it. Thanks for the advice.

How can i use lightmaps with the software renderer?
I want to use a diffuse texture and a lightmap.