Processing/Previewing selected areas

[preypacer]

Hey there... Quick question.

I'm checking out L3DT's Pro version and am working on a process to create a continent map based on a 'Drape Image'. The terrain is about 60 sq. kilometers and, so... is rather large, obviously.

Thing is.. it takes a really long time to process all the steps in order to get results that can be previewed. It took ~45 minutes to complete a setup where the only thing I did was set the water/sea area's elevation, leaving everything else alone, and even kept most settings off or very low to speed it up.

I created a map with more details enabled and 7 hours later (I'd literally gone to bed, woke up and it was still processing the water table).... so that's obviously a step I'd only want to take when processing a final version of the map; not something I'd want to use during ongoing editing/development.

This is obviously quite prohibitive in terms of making changes on the design map and then seeing how they look in 3D if you need to tweak something, etc.

Is there a way to limit the processing to a limited area of the map? I know you can create selections to apply different effects to those spots only, but can the processing of the map be similarly limted to the selected area? I imagine this would greatly increase the processing time and make it a lot easier to preview the results when focusing on a smaller area. Would be even better if it only loaded the selected area into sapphire, making loading and navigation that much faster as well.

There may well be a way to do this, but to date I haven't been able to find one.

Thanks!

[Aaron]

Hi Preypacer,

Sorry, L3DT doesn't currently have a way to generate only a selected area of the heightmap. However, there is a way to quickly generate a preview of the whole map at lower resolution. The 'Operations-> Heightfield-> Design/Inflate-> DesignInflate16' menu option will generate the heightfield at 1/4 resolution, which (all else being equal) will take 1/16th of the time of the full res heightfield. Other calculations (water map, etc.) should be correspondingly faster too. This lower-resolution preview will retain the shape and features of the full res map, but won't include all the fine-scale erosion channels &c.

By the way, what is the size of your heightmap in pixels?

Cheerio,
Aaron.

[preypacer]

Hi Preypacer,

Sorry, L3DT doesn't currently have a way to generate only a selected area of the heightmap. However, there is a way to quickly generate a preview of the whole map at lower resolution. The 'Operations-> Heightfield-> Design/Inflate-> DesignInflate16' menu option will generate the heightfield at 1/4 resolution, which (all else being equal) will take 1/16th of the time of the full res heightfield. Other calculations (water map, etc.) should be correspondingly faster too. This lower-resolution preview will retain the shape and features of the full res map, but won't include all the fine-scale erosion channels &c.

By the way, what is the size of your heightmap in pixels?

Cheerio,
Aaron.

Hi Aaron..

Thanks for the reply and info! That should definitely help with at least seeing if the overall effect is what I'm after. Will come in handy with trying to create some good looking mountains that I've been working on producing.

As of right now, I'm using a 8192x8192 heightmap with a 64 HM/DM ratio with a horizontal scale of 2 (I *think* those are the settings). I believe the overall size is 200-something SQ kilometers... which, with the size of the character scaled down and the walk speed slowed down, should be plenty big enough. Also bearing in mind that the landmass is a continent surrounded by water. I sent you a link to the base map I'd set up when requesting a pro version trial key a few days ago... so you should know what I'm referring to.

Incidentally, is there a way to adjust the walking speed itself? I couldn't find anything myself while poking around. I find that the walking speed in the program feels much faster than even a full sprint would be, and so I'm kinda losing the sense of "scale" of the map overall as it doesn't take nearly as long to cross it as it should, even as the bird flies. An area that I expect should take ~6-8 minutes to cross is only taking about 2.

Anyway.. I'll try that scaled down trick.. Thanks!

[Aaron]

Hi Preypacer,

Sorry, there's currently no way for users to adjust the movement speeds in Sapphire. I've added it to the to do list.

In better news, I've started work on allowing generation of selected areas of the heightmap. If all goes well, a workable draft should be included in a developmental build within a week or so (fingers crossed).

Cheers,
Aaron.

[preypacer]

Hi Preypacer,

Sorry, there's currently no way for users to adjust the movement speeds in Sapphire. I've added it to the to do list.

In better news, I've started work on allowing generation of selected areas of the heightmap. If all goes well, a workable draft should be included in a developmental build within a week or so (fingers crossed).

Cheers,
Aaron.

Ahh okay. Well, it's not an "OMG" dire emergency for the walk speed, it would just help (me anyway) with getting a sense of things being the right size, scale, etc. I don't have a good "mental sense" of scale in terms of "how big should a kilometer be in a virtual environment", same with miles, meters, etc. I tend to be a more "visual" person in that I relate to what I can see (complete right-brainer). So, when I'm moving across the landscape I'm working on, even though a given area might be half a kilometer across, it feels much smaller to me and I'm tempted to make it larger lol. So, having that kind of feedback would be immensely helpful in getting a feel for things and determining if something needs to be me larger or smaller, etc. Perhaps others would as well. Perhaps it would have other practical uses as well.

As for the generation of selected areas, that would be very helpful as well. Def. eager to see that in action.

Nice!

Thanks for the reply, Aaron.

[Aaron]

Hi Preypacer,

Previewing selected areas the heightfield from the design map is now available in L3DT Professional 11.12 dev build 2, which is on the Pro downloads page now. To generate a selected area, use the mouse selection tool to select the desired area of the design map, then click on the 'Operations->Heightfield->Generate area from DM...' menu option, select the desired HF/DM ratio (smaller = faster, larger = higher res.), and you're done.

Please note that generating other maps (e.g. water map, texture, etc.) from the 'preview' heightfield is not a good idea in this current implementation, and attempting to do so would probably cause weird results.

Anyway, please let me know how you go.

Best regards,
Aaron.