Free Heightmap editor

[AuShadow]

Hey all, so been looking at faster ways of making the terrains I want and thought I'd try the heightmap path, anyway after looking through a few, I found this little freebie:

http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/

quick play i auto generated a map, put into skyline and little touch ups on the edges to make this little Island:

[SolarPortal]

We used to use L3DT back in the day when we were doing some projecs on dxstudio & torque3d.

It creates some really nice terrains, especially those that can be split into multiple tiles which we have yet to support in our terrain system.

[AuShadow]

Yeah, only thing I found so far but, is you can make a heightmap and in L3DT 3D viewer you have mountain ranges and such but after putting to skyline there's a very low max height in the hills, I need to experiment some more but if I don't find a solution I'll post pics here to show you what I mean

[TattieBoJangle]

you can control the hill height by changing the multiplier in skyline just don't put it to high or the will just be jagged edges.

[AuShadow]

yeah cheers Tattie, i got around to finish watching your tutorial vid today and played with heightmaps a bit more. can get some good terrains fast

[SolarPortal]

Yes the terrain scale is what you need to adjust.

Basically, because a heightmap is an image of gradient with black being the lowest height and white being the highest, then if you know that your lowest point on the terrain is -50 and your highest on the terrain is 50, then a terrain scale of 100 will give you an accurate height range.

Its just our system works as if 0 height is black and highest scale point is white which can be any number.

Hope this helps And thanks tattie for helping out quickly.

[AuShadow]

Some more playing with heightmaps, found this one online and thought i'd try it, loaded in on the standard height multiplier of 75 and looks good:

[StarFire]

Nice height map

Did you know that Skyline has many height maps in the library, and you can store your own here too. These you can drag n drop onto a terrain.
Click the "Open AM Heightmaps>open button " located at the bottom of the terrain editor panel and this will open the asset manager on the heightmaps section, then drag a height map to the terrain from here.

[TattieBoJangle]

Nice height map

Did you know that Skyline has many height maps in the library, and you can store your own here too. These you can drag n drop onto a terrain.
Click the "Open AM Heightmaps>open button " located at the bottom of the terrain editor panel and this will open the asset manager on the heightmaps section, then drag a height map to the terrain from here.

This doesn't work anymore it places you here

[SolarPortal]

just tested and it seems to be working fine.
The image must be added to resources and a terrain has to be created already.

Q) Do the defaults in the folder work for you?

Edit: Just saw your image, just wondering if it is an installed issue? Will test and let you know.
Edit2: It is working on my dev version but not working on the installed version. Did not know this was happening lol
I will fix it for the next release
Edit3: The reason it is broken is because there is no heightmaps folder lol. Must have missed it in the first release.

[StarFire]

We have tested the released version of Skyline with the heightmap's folder in place and it seems to be working.

You will need to add this new folder to your asset library and it will put the heights maps into the correct location so that Skyline can see them. Please note that if the height maps are not put in the correct location the drag n drop functionality will not work.

For your reference the heightmaps are located on the following path:

Code: Select all

Asset Library/Textures/Terrain/Heightmaps

You can get the missing files here: http://www.chi-ad.com/Skyline/Temp/Textures_Heightmaps.zip

Note: The folder will need added to the resources.

[TattieBoJangle]

Many thanks for the fast reply and fix guys, it now works great

[StarFire]

Pleased it is working

[StarFire]

Here are some more height maps I found on the net:

http://www.chi-ad.com/Skyline/Temp/Tepers_Height_Maps_Vol_1.zip

just add them to the height maps folder, some of them are quite usable. Dont know about the licensing that is why I have not included them in the main pack

[AuShadow]

found the source of the tepers pack and under licensing it has free and open as long as the project its used in is also free and open, with that said, wouldn't be hard to make your own versions of the same kind of height maps if you did want to go commercial

[TattieBoJangle]

I don't believe you will be breaking any rules here as when you have used the height map you can simply remove the image or don't package the image with your game and in turn you'r not breaking any rules as everything belongs to skyline.

[SolarPortal]

i would tend to agree with that. As long as you don't redistribute the image, then you are no longer breaking the rules.
At most, by using it on the terrain inside skyline and editing the terrain. It might be classed as a derivative of the original work.