Giant's Causeway

[notareal]

I'd like to build a terrain like the Giant's Causeway.


Problem is that I cannot find a way to build a hightfield that has areas with sharp edge hexagonal patterns. I don't think that making those columns with texture will produce wanted effect. Columns can be larger than real ones, if it makes things any easier. Any ideas or is this impossible with L3DT? I was thinking that one solution could be that I'll made a hightfiend with columns in photoshop and merge it with the generated hightfield.

[BuLL]

Going by what I`ve read (don`t quote me on this,lol).You should be able to make the heightfield image in photoshop,save as a bmp/os2 & then import the bmp into L3DT.

[notareal]

RTFM... I should have done that

[SeerBlue]

There was some discussion on the World Machine forums a bit ago about just this terrain type, a macro for World Machine was developed that may do what you want. This link goes to the post about the macro and some links to images.
http://forum.world-machine.com/index.php?topic=497.0
SeerBlue

[Aaron]

Hello Notareal,

You might also like to try the file overlay feature. In this tutorial I show how to overlay a bitmap image containing "Hello World!" text, but you can simply replace that image with a image containing the heightfield of the hexagonal pillars of the type seen in Giant's Causeway.

The other option would be to write a plugin to filter the terrain. If you'd like to leave a request for someone to write a plugin, you can do that on the
plugin ideas page in the wiki.

Oh, I should mention that L3DT and other heightfield-based programs don't handle vertical surfaces all that well. You will find the texture gets quite stretched on the steep parts. Terragen 2 will reportedly do this properly, however, as it has a hybrid heightfield/mesh/procedural renderer.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[notareal]

This is bit far of what I like it to be, but it did give me some impression. I was planning to use it at the NWN2. After I made a test import, I did notice one problem. Hexagonal pattern is really hard to keep in right appearance when importing it. I think it might be impossible do this way and I have to build some custom textures for NWN2. Not giving up yet. Anyway, next I'll do a test where I do use different size hexagonal patterns, to find what is minimum working size of hexagonal geometry that shows right in NWN2 toolset. Something is sure there cannot be very steep vertical surfaces, as NWN2 don't handle those well.