lylejk wrote:
What program did you say you are using to create this terrain by chance? Very realistic.
The engine is Bohemia Interactive's Visitor3, in this case used to generate working maps for their ArmA 2 game. It does look good and the ability to create fantasy landscapes of huge scale is what lured me into it quite recently. I actually needed this (these) tools for a map I volunteered to do for another development crew as sort of a rush "can someone give me what I need"/learning experience, but they certainly have applications in many similar engines. My personal pet project is a volcanic island that is based in part on Hawaii (the basalt flows primarly) and inspired in large part by the highly volcanic Montserrat in the West Indies. I intend to make good use of these tools there too...
It's a common thing working on a representation of a large terrain to shorten the work by making simplistic "masks" that can tell the engine where to differentiate between terrain types... yellow for sand, green for grass, black for basalt, etc. Serious mappers can take months to get these masks dialed in where they need to be. As I primarily work with fantasy terrains I don't have quite the same concerns and can make use of such tools to turn a very simple two or three color bitmap into something more random... more "natural" looking... with ease. I'm not sure how it will work on interior terrains yet but for the rather chaotic transition from a sandy beach to grass covered dunes these tools are GOLDEN
I WAS using Filters/Noise/Spread to try and achieve the same sort of results but these tend to scramble pixels that I don't want moved too.
ofnuts wrote:
Good. Just ask in PM if you need small improvements.
Looks like the script works so well that I can't find where you used in the image above
Btw, care to provide a before/after example for the doc for when I put it on SourceForge?
Absolutely! I can supply a simple mask image, before/after, as well as in game rendering of the same terrain if you like. I'm trying to wrap up my volunteer rush job project as I type this (ooops!) but if you can give me a day or two I'll come up with something for you.
Again, many thanks for the rapid responses and thoughtful solutions!