Right, I'm having to get my hand back with this as well...so bear with me.
There wiill be two potential situations where a terrain will be imported to L3DT for MEDEM
1. To take advantage of L3DT's Design Map stage: build from scratch.(It will not actually be building from scratch, because you would not start out with a blank heightfield).
2. To apply any of the later stages that L3DT offers (potentially erosion to output textures), to a terrain already designed, designed+eroded, etc..(essentially a finished heightmap)
Taking 1. This is the full integration of L3DT into our workflow.
I initially thought that your example figures were 10x too large (which confused me at first), but I think I get it now.
I'm taking the minimum requirement here: the smallest element of our terrain: a 100 px tile. (The apps will be capable of importing larger tile sets obviously: so a 1K tile-set import that you quoted will also be possible.)
We will be importing a 100 px tile. It will need to upsized to a 1K pixel tile (again, it could be upscaled more while actually within the app to get a better res, just as long as it is output back to ME-DEM as a 1K tile- ie 20m res). If L3DT can take care of all of this rescaling so much the better.
Stick with the simplest case: the user upscales the tile to a 1k px square heightfield within L3DT.
So, I followed your instructions, and this is what I got:
(1) I imported a 100 px tile via File > Import Design Map (.bt, with world scale set to 200m)
Import Design Map Wizard:
2/3: File-> DM sample rate: 2
So this takes every 2nd pixel and uses it for the design map pixels: (so we should have a 50 x 50 Design Map)
3/3 Design Map parameters:
The application of these parameters I'm not fully understanding right now...so I turn them all to zero. Could you detail the rammifications of this dialog?
I leave everything else at defualt.
I do indeed get a 50 x 50 Design Map: great
OK, the scale is wrong, but so what?- we resample later.
(2) This is where we manually use the Design Map Pencil to do our stuff.
Operations > Heightfield > Generate Preview (as opposed to Generate map).
You said that there was a difference to the inflation routines between those two operations, what are they? (looking at the resampling dialog, it seems that the prev defaults to a smaller upscaling: x8, the full non-preview to 32, is that right?)
Before we continue in L3DT or export out of L3DT as a heightmap, we need to Resample map and Change horizontal scale.
Operations > Heightfield > Resample map: in this case, to 1K x 1K
Operations > Heightfield > 20m.
(3) We export the active map as a heightfield or go on to generate all of the L3DT goodies.
Now I get it! I had completely forgotten about the import design map feature on heightfields: very nice! Also, I was overlooking resampling- it really makes no odds.
The crux for MEDEM is stage (2). How to best use the info imported into the apps.
monks