Page 1 of 1

Importing Terra Incognita screenshots?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2017 11:43 pm
by LauraEss1957
I've recently come across something called Terra Incognita. It's an online fractal generator of basic terrains - mostly sea and a few varieties. Below shows a portion of this fractal map:

Image

Zooming into the red rectangle, you get more detail:

Image

I tried importing the image direct as a heightfield and got a rough inverse of it!

Image

That's interesting, but not very practical. Because it's an image map it's "spikey" and useless to work with. I could use the images as a drape and probably will as a guide to implied mountains. I'm lazy, I like the coastlines generated by this. Any ideas about how to import these so that I can get coastline I can play around with?

Re: Importing Terra Incognita screenshots?

PostPosted: Wed Feb 01, 2017 1:36 pm
by Aaron
Hi LauraEss1957,

I apologise for the delay in my reply.

I don't think there's going to be much joy here unless you can get the actual height data out of Terra Incognita. In addition to being colour-coded, those screenshots appear to be shaded as if lit from the north, so back-calculating the actual height data isn't likely to be possible (especially when you consider the dynamic range of the image format).

As for importing the coastline; sorry, I don't know of an algorithm for generating terrain based on the coastline. It may be possible to make something, but it's unlikely to work with any of L3DT's existing design map/heightmap algorithms.

Best regards,
Aaron.

Re: Importing Terra Incognita screenshots?

PostPosted: Mon Feb 06, 2017 8:42 am
by LauraEss1957
Fair enough. I guess if I really wanted to copy it I could use an image like that as a drape. I was just being a bit lazy. :P