Large water tables

[Jovin]

Howdy! Just starting to play with a registered version of L3DT, and I'm trying to generate maps for planetary objects at resolutions of 8k x 4k (1:2 height:width ratio) and up (for Orbiter 2006 actually). I'd like to see if L3DT can aid me in creating these hi-res planetary texture maps, up to 32k x 16k via Photoshop/Blender/etc. (and then conversion to the .tex format which Orbiter uses via a utility that comes with Orbiter).

I can generate the design map and heightfield (and I think the landmass shapes look great at high pixel counts BTW), but when I attempt to auto generate the water maps it processes for days (P4 3.2 hyperthreading proc, 2GB of memory, mosaic tile option on).

Is this normal???

Is there anything I can do to improve the processing here?

Thanks!

[Aaron]

Hi Jovin,

As far as I know, there's no way to speed up the calculation without sacrificing quality. However, if you're willing to sacrifice some quality, then set the 'nIter' parameter in the water-table flooding wizard to 2, or even 1 (the default is 3, I think). This reduces the number of iterations the calculation will perform, so if you're unlucky (i.e. your map topography is complex) the final result will be less smooth and might look odd in places. However, it's generally safe to use an nIter of 2 on most maps.

Your other option, which I generally don't recommend, is to skip the water table altogether. The water-table is basically used to get slightly prettier texture/land type positioning for such things as mud/sand near water, greener valleys, barren hill-tops, etc. In circumstances where the only water bodies in your map are at 0m altitude (i.e. no 'auto lakes'), this can work OK, but you need to use a climate optimised to work without the water table. 'Temperate (basic)' is an example of such a climate. Nevertheless, the textures produced by this method aren't quite as pretty, and you'll also need to spend a lot of time messing around in the climate editor tuning the parameters and altitude ranges to get things to look right. Not for the faint of heart.

Oh, one last thing. The estimated time remaining that's displayed for the water-table flooding calculation grossly overestimates the time at the beginning (maybe by as much as 3x, according to a quick test). So if it says "2 days" initially, it doesn't really mean it. The reason for this inaccuracy is that the water-flooding algorithm does some self-optimisation that kicks-in after a few cycles and speeds the whole thing up. This optimisation is dependent on both the map and the settings chosen by the user, so it can't be predicted in advance.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Jovin]

Thanks Aaron! Gotcha, yeah, I'm trying to run something large and complex, so I just have to deal. Thanks for the tip, I'll keep that in mind.

Cheers

[hunterkiller]

On the subject of planetary stuff... is it possible to include an option for more spherical projections in future versions? That'd be neat. The tool "Wilbur" has a mode for this type of thing, but I've had a heckuva time getting heightmaps from there into L3DT for texture calculations. Between scales and such I've just about given up on my sphere terrain. I have the geometry and texturing working, but I can't get something looking good because of content. Anyway I'd love to see planet support in the future.