L3DT documentation
Large 3D terrain generator

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Tour by images

Welcome! 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.

:l3dt:about:dmv1.png :l3dt:about:dmv2.png

The progress display whilst generating the heightfield is both pretty and bewildering…

:l3dt:about:hfgen.png

And voi la! Here is the heightfield:

:l3dt:about:hf.jpg

You can modify your heightfield using a range of 3D editing tools:

:l3dt:about:hf_edit.jpg

You can do some global operations, such as re-scale the altitudes (show below), resize the map, clip altitude ranges, etc.

:l3dt:about:hfvscale.jpg

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:

:l3dt:about:wmflood.jpg

The calculation queue wizard allows you to set several calculations to run automatically:, allowing you to walk away and do more important things:

:l3dt:about:calcqueue.jpg

One such calculation is the normals map:

:l3dt:about:tn.jpg

Another is the lightmap. L3DT performs fast shadow-casting and support bump-mapping, high-resolution light maps, and water absorption effects:

:l3dt:about:lm.jpg :l3dt:about:lmhires.jpg

Here is a bit more eye-candy, which occurs when generating the texture map:

:l3dt:about:tx_calc.jpg

And here is the texture map:

:l3dt:about:tx.jpg

L3DT can also calculate alpha maps, which are suitable for texture-splatting:

:l3dt:about:alpha.jpg :l3dt:about:alpha2.jpg

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:

:l3dt:about:export.jpg

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:

:l3dt:about:3d.jpg

Here is a render of a map I prepared earlier, using extremely high resolution textures and pre-baked bump-mapped lighting:

www.bundysoft.com_l3dt_gallery_r24_27may06_16xtex1.jpg

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:

:l3dt:about:docs.png

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.

:l3dt:about:wiki.png

Finally, we have a lively users' forum for support questions, feature requests, resource sharing, and general chit chat.

:l3dt:about:forum.png

Well, that's it. I hope this has been informative.

 
l3dt/about/tour.1294889204.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/08/31 05:37 (external edit)
 
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