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can anyone tell me of a way I can or if it is possible for me to editing terrain based on the texture map.

At the moment I am editing soley on the heightfield map. If I could use the texture map it would be a lot easier for me to use that as a guide to where I want to have various features. Such as ditches, roads with sloped sides, cliff drop offs etc. I am currently building a terrain for Arma 3 and if I could use my sat map as a guide for these types of features it would help greatly in the editing process. Otherwise I am at the slow mercy of the software used for terrain editing and model placement in the Arma franchise.

Any tips would be great thanks!

Kia ora

Not to great with this yet, just new. but wondered if you where to convert the texture to Grey scale and load that.
You may need to invert it then edit it in 3d to sort things out, just a stab in the dark idea of course.

The other weird one that came to mind was converting it to grey scale loading it into a plane displacement in 3DMax
then adding a material that is white at the top and black at the bottom, (Not the best tutor but he get the texture point across)
to turn you texture into a heightmap. again not sure if it's a help

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5QD6D9pYfE

what I am actually talking about is editing the green 3d model you get but have the green replaced with the sat texture map instead.

Spookygnu wrote:what I am actually talking about is editing the green 3d model you get but have the green replaced with the sat texture map instead.

Can you load it into Max by creating a plane and using a displacement modifier adding a gradient texture (making sure toe top is white and bottom black)
then doing a render to export that as grey scale or mono

If the sat texture is the same size it could be loaded as a texture with no tiling right?

Hi Spookygnu,

I apologise for my slow reply. To overlay a satellite image in the 3D renderer, you first need to import the image as a custom RGB colour map layer in L3DT (see 'File->Import->New map layer' in menu). Then, in the Sapphire 3D renderer, select the 'Options->Terrain->Select texture' menu option, and choose your imported RGB layer. For an example, please see the roads tutorial.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

Thanks for your input kiwi, but i don't have 3dsmax and you are talking abit overly technical for my level of understanding on software editing atm. I use photoshop, l3dt and the arma editing tools.

@ arron, thanks for the info, i had actually forgot about my post due to rl and being stuck into a project i'm currently working on. I'll give this play and see how i get on. I know how to do the roads already, having a sat image as a guide would speed not only the roads up but the feature making aswell. It is very slow in buldozer( the 3d renderer for arma).

Thanks

Spook

I can see how you can do this just for roads Arron, but what I would ideally like to do is to be able to actually see my Satmap without having to paint it onto the green landmass. So, when I press "H" for my height brush tools, (my map image doesn't disappear and go to the green landmass) I can adjust the terrain accordingly to my satellite map. Otherwise I am back and forth between the sat image and the green island.

I may be misunderstanding a process you have pointed out or I may not be describing it correctly.