L3DT Users' Community

Hi,

I'm using L3DT Pro 2.4 RC1 (demo) with a heightfield I generated from DEM data. I used 3DEM to convert the DEM to a 256 grayscale heightfield, then cropped it in GIMP to create a 2048x2048 .png. I've imported this into L3DT as a heightmap and am walking through the various steps accepting almost all the defaults (temperate coastal land type, tropical water type).

My first obstacle was that about 3/4 of the way through the process it told me that my .png heightfield wasn't a native file format? When I try to select the ".png" format it does nothing. So I manually saved each of the maps and it appeared to save them in .jpg format.

My next issue was when I tried to open my project into L3DTVi2. When I do so, it crashes. No error messages, it just appears to hang during the file load.

Am I doing something wrong? Thanks!

Hi bigkahuna,

This has been a bit of a hot topic lately. For example:

http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=184
http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=185
http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=192
http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=178
http://www.bundysoft.com/docs/doku.php?id=l3dtvi2:buglist:startcrash

In summary, the problem is that PNG is not a 'native' format, insofar as it does not store all the scaling information that 'proper' terrain formats such as HFF, TER and BT do. Hence PNG can only be imported or exported, never loaded or saved as part of the project. So, what you need to do is select one of these formats for the heightfield in the file-preferences dialog. I recommend HFF because that's the format required by L3DTVi2 (and that's the reason it locked up here).

I've made a change to the final v2.4 (due Friday) so that the 'active' format for the heightfield is not set when you import from a non-native format. This will prevent this problem occurring quite so frequently.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Thanks Aaron, I'll give that a try!