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Attribute Map requests--climate masking and spatter brush

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Attribute Map requests--climate masking and spatter brush

Postby guy Riessen » Tue Mar 18, 2008 6:55 pm

Hi Aaron,

Here I come with more requests! :shock:

I was working with the 2D attribute brush quite a bit last night, and there are a few things which would be very cool to include.

1. A spatter, or diffusion brush with an ability to control the noise/clumping. Even better would be a brush where you could define a couple different materials, and then set the noise/octaves to mix the diffusion between the two material as you paint. Also the ability to set the fade from the painted material and underlying material. Basically all the blending settings you have for blending materials in the climates.

Currently when you paint with the attribute brush, the final result looks simply painted on--fine if you're doing asphalt or concrete, but not as good if you're doing trees/brush etc. Of course, now you can go back and set a small brush and whappity-whap, as randomly as you can, grass and rocks into the painted on trees, but it would be cool if the process where much more optimized.


2. This is related. It would also be cool if you could define an "area" via painting a mask or masks, which would function as mini climates. Currently you have loads of control over very cool blending based on height, as well as watertable. But, I'd also like to be able to generate a base attribute map made up of grass, dry grass, rocks, and brush all in the current method. Then I'd like to be able to use an area-based brush to paint on the generated attribute map, in order to define a hardwood forest climate, which in turn may have trees, brush, rocks set in the usual weighted fashion, and would be applied only in those areas I've masked--again with the currently available noise/octave blending and hard or fuzzy blended edges.

Currently, the only way I can think to achieve a similar result would be if I confined a "hardwood" subset of materials to a very narrow elevation range. But if I could mask an entire area, I would be able to have that hardwood area go partway up a slope for instance, or down to a waters' edge, but be confined otherwise to just a small portion of the total map area.


Of the two, the second is far more valuable, I think, for giving control over the climates to the artists, but on the other hand I think the first request may be easier to implement sooner? :)

Thanks!
--guy
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Postby Aaron » Wed Mar 19, 2008 7:49 am

Hi Guy,

Thanks for these suggestions too. I've put the second item on my to-do list for v2.6, as it fits quite well with my other plans. The first suggestion seems like a subset of the second, so I won't list it individually.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

PS: Have you tried painting climate coverage with the design map brush? If you put your 'hardwood' land types into their own climate, this may be a way to control their distribution. However, the design map is quite coarse...
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Postby guy Riessen » Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:20 pm

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that out tonight and see what kind of results I can get with the design map set high and a real low-res image drape to try and match!

--guy
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Postby Aaron » Fri Mar 21, 2008 10:27 am

Hi Guy,

I've included an 'auto-calc' option in the next update* to the attributes map brush. With this option, you choose the climate, and L3DT will then calculate for each pixel which land type is the most appropriate. Here is an example:

Image

In the foreground I've applied some 'arctic' climate (rocks and snow), and in the background I've applied some 'desert' climate (cliffs, rocks, sand, etc.)

Note also that there is now a 'spraycan' brush pattern, which does as you would expect.

Cheerio,
Aaron.

* that being the first dev build after L3DT release 2.5c (which is due tomorrow-ish.)
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Postby Aaron » Sun Mar 23, 2008 10:48 am

Hi Guy,

The updated attributes map brush is included in the updated installer for L3DT release 2.5, which is now available for download. Please let me know what you think.

Best regards,
Aaron.
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Postby guy Riessen » Mon Mar 24, 2008 4:03 am

Fantastic, and I already downloaded the update for the LM fix (although oddly I wasn't having an issue creating either LM or NM in non-mosaic mode, which I don't use). Will be trying the new features out momentarily!
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