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Height Field Editing

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Height Field Editing

Postby LordThrash » Thu Jun 03, 2010 5:03 pm

Hey, after years of tinkering I'm now really making stuff with l3dt for my torque game project.

I find I spend most of my time tweaking my terrain height fields with the limited brushes available in the sapphire height editing. I have a few suggestions, don't know if anybody has mentioned them yet. I am also open to hear better way to work than what I'm trying to do.

Brush influence falloff curves. Very useful for raise/lower brushes. I would like to see at least 3 brush fall off curves as presets (linear, Exponential, and Smooth like a bell shape)

I use a Wacom tablet so I would love to have brush pressure sensitivity for brush intensity.

An erosion brush. Or some way to do an addition erosion calculation over the whole map heightfield with mask intensities. After editing some terrain to work better with my level I'm making, I lose the cool look of the terrain that the erosion from the initial heightfield generation had.

I find the height editing very difficult because of the active LOD. Trying to up the tris displayed brings sapphire to its knees and at useable LOD levels I'm not actually seeing the results of my fine detail I'm trying to create. would it be possibly to just display the area right around the brush in full detail?

Less important ideas that could still be useful:
A "beach" tool, kind of like avalanche where the terrain is lowered and smooths out sloping gently around water level.

Improved cliff operations. Currently Cliffs brush seems to operate at relative height and then down (its really a chasm brush), where I think it would be much more useful as a relative height and up.

I would think a Raise To Relative and Lower To Relative where the height at center of the brush at first click is used for the entire brush stroke.

Continue bulldoze from last endpoint option. Photoshop does this with a line tool when holding down shift.

Smooth upward pointing tris/points option
Smooth lower pointing tris/points only option
I don't know exactly how to do these two but the idea is good for making the perlin noise have different characteristics, by smoothing out the upper part to give more flattened ground with cracks or flattened ground with some rock jutting out.

Perlin noise brush upward/Perlin downward - similar idea to above but the initial perlin noise has its midpoint influence falloff either upward or downward. Would give you random bumps interspersed on level terrain (or sinkholes) It would be pretty powerful to control the midpoint value as well.

That is probably a lot more than you would ever want to do, but I thought I would share the improvements I would like to see at some time.
LordThrash
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Postby Telarus » Sat Jun 05, 2010 10:09 pm

I've run into many of these situations as well. Wanting to paint a few erosion strokes over an area I've smoothed or altered is a big one. I also use a wacom tablet, and changing brush sizes with the scroll wheel alone (is there another hotkey?) has slowed me down.

I'm really tempted to take a heightfield into Mudbox (or Zbrush at school) and work with it that way (it's specialized for this type of 2d editing of a 3d object) to really clean it up. I'm also considering the deformers and painter-tools in Maya.

Much of the above workflows are best if the mesh is "all-quads" (as opposed to a triangulated mesh"), so I'm exploring how to get a mesh with that type of polyflow from the heightfield.
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Postby Aaron » Sun Jun 06, 2010 10:27 pm

Hello LordThrash and Telarus,

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll keep these in mind for v3.0.

I will certainly look into an erosion brush, or some sort of selected area erosion tool if a realtime brush is too slow.

Cheerio,
Aaron.
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