L3DT Users' Community

I'm wondering if someone converting terragen surf for L3DT. There are so many nice terragen surface outhere.

Hi Adezm,

I don't think anyone has written a converter yet, and after having a quick look at the srf format specifications, I'm not sure a satisfactory one can be written. The problem is that, whilst Terragen's surface maps and L3DT's climates are similar in concept, the implementations are very different. You could convert a few parameters such as altitude range, for instance, but most of the CLI settings have no analogue in SRF, and vice-versa. Here are some examples:

• L3DT does not support nesting of surface layers, as Terragen does.
• Terragen's bump-mapping is internally generated by fractals, whereas L3DT's bump-mapping is 'imported' from bump-map images.
• The 'variation' in Terragen surfaces is by one fractal generator, whereas L3DT currently uses up to three perlin generators. The control parameters for these cannot be converted.
• Terragen's 'coverage' parameter has no analogue in L3DT.
• Terragen has a min/max slope, whereas L3DT has a gradient coefficient. These are fundamentally different, and you can't convert from one to the other.
• L3DT's texture-layers have no analogue in Terragen.
• L3DT's curvature, water and salinity coefficients have no analogue in Terragen.

So, in summary, any converter from SRF to CLI would only be able to convert a few minor aspects from the surface map (name, alt range, diffuse colour), but would miss most of the complex stuff (textures, bump-maps, noise/variation). Sorry to disappoint.

Cheers,
Aaron.