Importing Heightfield...

[Yuval]

I've started using L3DT (and starting mapping to ArmA) today, I actually got a pretty good knowledge in the minimal basics (and I'm proud of it! ). Just in order to expand, I made my own map (didn't notice it was 100x100 meters ), with a snowy mountain, a lake, a river some grass and a rocky hill! After I did that, I started all over again to make a serious map for ArmA 3.

My map is 17x17km (303sq km), I tried to make a starting terrain which is splited to sea (-100 in height) and land (10 in height) but the editor was too laggy and it was wayyy had for me. So I simply did what I could and exported the heightmap as a PNG to photoshop!

I photoshopped it and this is the result:

http://i.imgur.com/zUM8Dg3.png

Great! I have a great basis for my map in .PNG.

Now the "easy" part, I need to import it back to L3DT!

But guess what? It doesn't work .

Whenever I try I need to choose some kind of a format, I chose Heightmap and it showed me a white map with yellow lines where the black and white areas connect with eachother, importing as a PNG is not functional as a heightmap.

Can someone tell me how can I make my .png a heightmap layer? Thanks

[Aaron]

Hi Yuval,

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for your question.

Whenever I try I need to choose some kind of a format, I chose Heightmap and it showed me a white map with yellow lines where the black and white areas connect with eachother, importing as a PNG is not functional as a heightmap.

I'm not quite sure I can see the error here. The yellow lines are contour lines, which are drawn on the 2D display window to show steps in height of 1000 metres (incidentally, this probably means you didn't specify the vertical range in the import wizard, as you shouldn't see a yellow line with your -100->10 height range). If the contour lines are not to your liking, you can disable them by un-checking the 'View->Display effects->Show heightfield contour lines' in the menu.

Aside from the contour lines, is there any reason you don't think the heightfield import worked? Put another way, what were you expecting to see in L3DT after you imported the heightfield from the PNG image?

Best regards,
Aaron.

[Yuval]

Well thanks for the reply first of all.

It seems like you're right. I didn't write anything about max and min height.

I am right now going to try the trial and see if it helps me with mapping (because I would like to have 1m cell for higher resolution.

1 question - I am an ArmA (new) mapper and it seems to me like when I try to load a texture to the climates manager the texture is very big in Sapphire, instead of being normal (It's pretty hard to explain the situation) - Do you have any idea how to minimize the size of the texture when using the texture brush in sapphire?

Last but not least, I have a suggestion - which is making new height tools or customization options to them. For example when I wish to raise the terrain just a bit, I either need to raise it and use the smooth tool (which takes time) to smooth the terrain, or (very slowly) raise the terrain click by click until I'm satisfied. Maybe adding a tool that will raise the terrain gently with no pointed hilltops is a good idea? Because I find it really hard to create mountains (I need to use "raise brush", "leveller" and "smooth" just to create a mountain is smooth his pointed tops.

[Aaron]

Hi Yuval,

I'm sorry for the delay in my reply.

1 question - I am an ArmA (new) mapper and it seems to me like when I try to load a texture to the climates manager the texture is very big in Sapphire, instead of being normal (It's pretty hard to explain the situation) - Do you have any idea how to minimise the size of the texture when using the texture brush in sapphire?

My apologies if this sounds obvious: one cannot make a pixel in the material's texture smaller than a pixel in the output texture*. Consequently, the two possible ways to shrink the size of the material texture on the output texture are:

1. Down-sample the material's texture image, which is a bit nasty, or;
2. generate the terrain texture map at higher resolution (see 'TX/HF ratio' setting in the texture wizard), which shrinks the size of pixels in the output texture, and looks rather good (see texture quality at different resolutions). Note this results in large texture files, and may not be compatible with your game engine if it expects a fixed texture resolution.

Last but not least, I have a suggestion - which is making new height tools or customization options to them...

Thanks for the suggestion. Support for custom tools is on the development plan, but alas I can't give any estimate of when it might be implemented (the crystal ball is a bit cloudy at the moment).

Best regards,
Aaron.

* well, you can, but you can't do it with a standard terrain texture map; you have to use texture splatting, and that has to be supported by your target game engine. If you're using splatting, then the texture in L3DT is pretty much irrelevant.