Processing/Previewing selected areas
Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2011 4:24 pm
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!
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!