Humble Suggestions...
Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2013 11:29 pm
Being new here, I don't want to sound greedy. I'm fully aware of the huge effort to make these changes, as I'm a programmer myself. And bear in mind that there's probably something I haven't discovered yet that might solve some of the issues I'm facing.
My goal here is to create a 3D version of a map I've created for a novel I'm publishing later this year. I'd like to explore the possibility of generating realistic scenes and even animations to help promote my book or enrich the reading experience. (Not sure yet how practical this will be, I just thought it might be cool.)
With that in mind, I've created a huge L3DT map with a detailed horizontal scale: 6400 x 4864 x 114. It equates to about 750km in width, and currently takes up over 100MB on disk. I've got the basic elevations in place, using Photoshop and gray scales from the original map. I can't really use anything but the heightfield map, at least not yet, as my world is already "designed", so to speak, and the specifics of the plot rely heavily on existing geographic features. So at this point I spend most of my time in Sapphire to get the details right. Because of it's size, there are a few things that are slowing down my progress, and I have a few suggestions that might improve this. Again, keep in mind that I might be missing a better way to accomplish this.
1) An ability to turn off the refresh of the heightfield when I exit Sapphire (or at least the ability to save the project from within it). I'm a big believer in frequently saving my changes, and it's a bit frustrating to wait for the screen to refresh or to cancel it just to save to disk. It often takes close to 30 seconds for the refresh, especially if I have my existing map as an image drape. (I have a 4-core AMD with 10gb of memory.)
2) An ability to remember the geographic location I was last at in Sapphire. I can use Teleport presets, but it gets pretty tedious to keep using it to get back to where I left off.
3) An ability to apply a Perlin noise (and maybe fractal) to the entire landscape. The map has a LOT of mountains in it, and I spend a huge amount of time getting them to look right. Here is where I most suspect there might be a better way to accomplish this (I still don't fully understand the ZeoGraph tool), but I haven't discovered how yet.
4) Rivers and lakes. It's impractical trying to get the water flood tool to obey my existing landscape, as a lake at 1000m that empties into the ocean via a long, sloping river ends up flooding the coast. My guess it's because I didn't originally design the map in L3DT, so the geographic rules don't fit what the water-flooding calculations are expecting. However, it would still be nice to have the same kind of direct control over water that I enjoy with heights in Sapphire -- "put lake here", "draw river there", and so on, so that it shows up blue just like the zero-altitude for sea level does.
So there's my "Christmas list". I still really like this program. Everything else I've tried has way too steep a learning curve. Thanks!
My goal here is to create a 3D version of a map I've created for a novel I'm publishing later this year. I'd like to explore the possibility of generating realistic scenes and even animations to help promote my book or enrich the reading experience. (Not sure yet how practical this will be, I just thought it might be cool.)
With that in mind, I've created a huge L3DT map with a detailed horizontal scale: 6400 x 4864 x 114. It equates to about 750km in width, and currently takes up over 100MB on disk. I've got the basic elevations in place, using Photoshop and gray scales from the original map. I can't really use anything but the heightfield map, at least not yet, as my world is already "designed", so to speak, and the specifics of the plot rely heavily on existing geographic features. So at this point I spend most of my time in Sapphire to get the details right. Because of it's size, there are a few things that are slowing down my progress, and I have a few suggestions that might improve this. Again, keep in mind that I might be missing a better way to accomplish this.
1) An ability to turn off the refresh of the heightfield when I exit Sapphire (or at least the ability to save the project from within it). I'm a big believer in frequently saving my changes, and it's a bit frustrating to wait for the screen to refresh or to cancel it just to save to disk. It often takes close to 30 seconds for the refresh, especially if I have my existing map as an image drape. (I have a 4-core AMD with 10gb of memory.)
2) An ability to remember the geographic location I was last at in Sapphire. I can use Teleport presets, but it gets pretty tedious to keep using it to get back to where I left off.
3) An ability to apply a Perlin noise (and maybe fractal) to the entire landscape. The map has a LOT of mountains in it, and I spend a huge amount of time getting them to look right. Here is where I most suspect there might be a better way to accomplish this (I still don't fully understand the ZeoGraph tool), but I haven't discovered how yet.
4) Rivers and lakes. It's impractical trying to get the water flood tool to obey my existing landscape, as a lake at 1000m that empties into the ocean via a long, sloping river ends up flooding the coast. My guess it's because I didn't originally design the map in L3DT, so the geographic rules don't fit what the water-flooding calculations are expecting. However, it would still be nice to have the same kind of direct control over water that I enjoy with heights in Sapphire -- "put lake here", "draw river there", and so on, so that it shows up blue just like the zero-altitude for sea level does.
So there's my "Christmas list". I still really like this program. Everything else I've tried has way too steep a learning curve. Thanks!