Can i make a golf course ?!

[oliveiracarlos]

Hi, i am new in terrain design...

I am learning game developer and i would like to know: "Can i make a golf course with L3DT ?"

I did a test with a photoshop grey scale map but i dont know how to apply textures, tress, and so one.

Will this tool help me ?

thanks,
Carlos.

[Aaron]

Hi Carlos,

L3DT is not really designed to make something as specific as a golf-course; it's mostly designed for automatic natural terrain generation with a little (but not too much) manual editing.

Anyway, L3DT might help you in the texturing part. To make a map texture in L3DT, I'd recommend you follow this procedure:

1. Import your heightfield.
2. If you want to tweak your heightfield in a 3D editor, select the 'Operations->Heightfield->Edit in 3D' option. Once you're done, close the 3D viewer window.
3. Open the water flooding tool ('Mouse tools->WM flood tool' in menu) and flood your lakes, water traps, etc.
4. Flood the water table using the 'Operations->Water map->Flood water table' option.
5. Generate the attributes map ('Operations->Attributes map->Generate map'). This is the mask used to generate the texture later.
6. Click on the 'Edit' toolbar button to open the 'attributes map brush'. This allows you to paint the texture mask so that the various land types (grasses, presumably) are exactly where you want.
7. Finally, generate the normals map, light map and texture map using the calculation wizard ('Operations->Calc. wizard' in menu).

To do a good job of this, you'd also want to make a 'climate' for your golf course that includes the right textures for greens, fairways, rough, etc. For this, you could probably copy and edit an existing climate, like the 'simple' climate.

For more information on any of these steps I'd suggest you consult the user guide, which goes into all the details regarding settings, options, etc.

Ah yes, I nearly forget: L3DT does not currently support tree placement, so you will need another program to do this part. However, I can't recommend a specific program, as I don't know of any applications that are well-suited to golf course design (I'm sure they exist; I just don't know them).

Best regards,
Aaron.