Exporting The Terrain As A Mesh

In this tutorial you will learn how to export the terrain created in Freeworld3D as a standard mesh file.  Navigate to the following menu item - Tools - Export Terrain.  You will then need to change the file type to Wavefront OBJ.  This will export the terrain as a Wavefront OBJ file as well as the material .mtl file.
      

The exported Material .mtl file will have the terrain texture named terrain.bmp.  You may edit the file as necessary to change this.  But exporting the terrain mesh assumes that the Terrain Layers have been collapsed into a single texture.  See the Documentation PDF file for information on how to do this.  When you are done you should have two files as shown below.

The Material .mtl file will look like this.

After exporting the terrain, you can then import it into many of the popular modeling software toolkits, including: 3dsmax, Maya, Milkshape and Blender.  NOTE:  Milkshape does not support models with over 2^16 vertices, since it uses 16bit indices.  Hence Milkshape will not import terrains higher than 256x256.

From here you may optimize the polygon count.  In the example above the terrain mesh was 256x256 vertices and so we do not need that much detail, especially in flat areas of the terrain.  In 3dsmax the optimization can be accomplished by using the Optimize modifier.  When complete the terrain mesh triangle count will be dramatically reduced.