New to L3DT - Question about importing maps

[Madcowthomas]

Hello everyone

Thought take a sec and say hi to everyone here at L3DT. Creating a game in the Torque engine. Are team is busy working on various parts of the game and I was placed in charge of creating the worlds and models that are inside them.

So that brings me to my few million questions that have surfaced as start learning L3DT.

Already drew out what are planets look like on paper and like to be able to duplicate this in L3DT. What is the best solution to this in order to keep the idea in tactic?

So I tryed scanning the image and imported them into photoshop and painted the water blue and left the land mass white. Then imported the map into L3DT but the images are extreme blocky. And then start to apply different methods , then lose the concept was creating.

Is there a method to this madness that allow me to keep my ideas? Starting to learn the DM tool, all have to say is really confused now,lol

Like to say in advanced thanks for any help in the matter..

madcowthomas

[piratelord]

Hi.

It's a bit more complex then importing a file that say's this is water and this is land.

You need to provide a full heightmap (or L3DT can produce one based on settings).
example: http://www.gameprogrammer.com/fractal/heightmap.jpg

Black being lowest altitude, white being highest altitude. It also has to be a 16bit image.

For our project (using Torque) the project leader produced a fractal map, which then we converted to grey scale and balanced.
I'm then importing bits of this heightmap for L3DT to reprocess to look more natural, export back to our main map, and overlay it and blend it together with the original map. Mainly it's the mountains that L3DT does a lot better. Then there's constant tweaking for the final product.

Heres another example. It's from our project. It shows the original fractal map, the conversion to a true heightfield, and how it looks in the viewer.
http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r75/ ... onComp.jpg

[Aaron]

Hello,

Might I also suggest the import design map feature? This allows you to import a rough design as a heightfield (but not necessarily a 16-bit format), and then have L3DT generate a full heightmap based on that design. This option seems to be pretty popular amongst the crowd that like to design their maps using paint-esque software.

Cheers,
Aaron.

PS: Just to reiterate what Piratelord said; the terrain map has a height value at each pixel, which is often represented as a greyscale image, where brightness=height. So, if you have a map that's white and blue, that will be interpreted as a map with lots of uniformly-high elevation (the white bits), and areas of about 1/3 elevation (blue being one third the greyscale intensity of white). So basically, your map of here-be-land and here-be-water is interpreted as a map with only two height levels. Unless you really turn up the erosion/roughness/etc overlay settings, L3DT will produce blocky edges due to the highly stepped design.

PPS: Thanks for the explanation Piratelord!

[piratelord]

Ah, I never tried the import design map feature. I might have to give it a whirl, I've got plenty of world space that needs improving.
Sounds like I already do the same as import design map, just a more roundabout way

On one island, we wanted it to be mountains, but with lots of "valleys", so on my original map I just drew in manually dark lines representing the valleys, then L3DT just processed this map and produced natural looking mountain system, which also included most of my valleys I drew.
Amazing job.

Always amazes me this program!