This is an old revision of the document! Tour by imagesWelcome! This page will take you on a visual tour through the features of L3DT. Here we go… L3DT lets you design the heightfield using a low-resolution 'design map', which you can edit using a brush tool (see below). The design map lays out the general shape of the heightfield, and also sets the strength and position of effects such as volcanos, erosion, etc. This approach allows you to easily design extremely large maps, up to 131,072×131,072 pixels in size.
The progress display whilst generating the heightfield is both pretty and bewildering… And voi la! Here is the heightfield: You can modify your heightfield using a range of 3D editing tools: You can do some global operations, such as re-scale the altitudes (show below), resize the map, clip altitude ranges, etc. L3DT also includes a range of water-mapping functions, including automatic and manual flooding of water bodies and the water table. Below you can see the flood water body mouse tool in operation: The calculation queue wizard allows you to set several calculations to run automatically:, allowing you to walk away and do more important things: One such calculation is the normals map: Another is the lightmap. L3DT performs fast shadow-casting and support bump-mapping, high-resolution light maps, and water absorption effects:
Here is a bit more eye-candy, which occurs when generating the texture map: And here is the texture map: L3DT can also calculate alpha maps, which are suitable for texture-splatting:
All of your maps can be saved as L3DT project files for later use. You can also export individual maps as separate files, or as tiled sets of files, using a wide variety of file formats: With L3DT comes a free and open-source realtime 3D rendering program called L3DTVi2, which was written by Stuart Gooding using GLScene. Here is a 3D render of the map shown above: Here is a render of a map I prepared earlier, using extremely high resolution textures and pre-baked bump-mapped lighting: If you'd like to know more about L3DT you can find on this website an extensive user guide that explains in detail the operations, dialog boxes, and other aspects of using L3DT: In addition to the 'official' documentation, there is a wiki site for user-submitted tutorials, reviews, and useful links to other sites, as well as being the home for users' project pages, and the L3DT climate and plugin repositories. Finally, we have a lively users' forum for support questions, feature requests, resource sharing, and general chit chat. Well, that's it. I hope this has been informative. Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license:CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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