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Large 3D terrain generator

Calculation Mask

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Calculation Mask

Postby David Walters » Fri Mar 04, 2011 10:05 am

Hi, I thought of an idea to help speed up L3DT.

For a terrain I'm making there are large areas of ocean, my toolchain replaces tiles that are entirely under a certain altitude for a generic 'open ocean' tile. However in L3DT I'm unable to compute only this map data I actually need and so map generation is taking much longer than it needs to.

I'd like to use a boolean map to mask calculation. Meaning no water, attributes, normals, lighting, etc. are computed for these areas.

(I'm imagining this to be a 1 pixel : 1 heightfield sample ratio.)

This feature could also be used to recompute small areas of a terrain affected by a local heightfield adjustment, and I can think of a few more uses, like if you were working on a climate.

This sounds very powerful to me, what do you think?

Oh and bonus points for letting me use a L3DT mask map for this - generating those is really simple. In fact if it was exclusively that - say have a combo box on the Calculation wizard letting you pick one of these maps to use as a mask for calculation - that would be a perfect starter. You could later add the option to import in images as masks or to paint your own.

Thanks for reading,
David
David Walters
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Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 1:10 pm

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