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