greyscale hills

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/greyscale hills

grindalf(Posted 2009) [#1]
Im making a greyscaler colormapper, the colormapper is going really nice(exports a 2048x2048 colormap) but the greyscaler is not going well, I can raise the terrain but not in a smooth hill shape.
I know a few people have made greyscalers and just wondered how they created smooth hills.
thanks any advice would be apriecieted :D


Ross C(Posted 2009) [#2]
I believe you have a falloff value, where by the surrounding vertices/pixels are less affected. It usually spreads out circularly. 100% affected in the middle, then 90% affected slightly out from that.

In fact, some have the falloff being exponential, not linear, to give you a better rounded hill.


Warner(Posted 2009) [#3]
Yes, try blurring the image before loading it as a heightmap.


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2009) [#4]
Nevertheless, using LoadTerrain limits to 256 height levels. Also, using only strict greytones does the same with mesh-based heightmaps. Using some sort of "brownscale" will provide more levels. If you use all 3 channels, then you'll get 256*3 levels: eg. 20,20,20 > 21,20,20 > 21,21,20 > 21,21,21 etc.


grindalf(Posted 2009) [#5]
@jfk I was considering a full colorscale. but i was thinking of it more like this
the red controling the y
the green controling the x
and the blue controling the z
this of course is not posible with the loadterrain command but could be made from the Load_terrain function in the code archieves(Ive forgotten who wrote it, sorry)
you wouldent be able to move them on the x or z much(as it would stretch the texture to much) but you would be able to have small overhangs on the cliffs which would look very cool


Ross C(Posted 2009) [#6]
It was me! That is an interesting idea though. I will try and modify it to suit this purpose if you want? How do you intend to generate this map though?


grindalf(Posted 2009) [#7]
I dont really know, I guess I haven't thought that far ahead yet :(


Ross C(Posted 2009) [#8]
Well, one way you could do it, is to take your heightmap, and multiply your height by 255 * 255

That way, you can store effectively 16,581,375 different height levels :)

That should be plenty i reckon. Let me try something...


Ross C(Posted 2009) [#9]
Nope, sorry. I was thinking too far ahead of myself... Your going to need a tool to generate this kind of thing.


grindalf(Posted 2009) [#10]
anyway the thing i mainly wanted was smooth hills, and the best i can comeup with is a hill that looks like an umbrella


Ross C(Posted 2009) [#11]
Do you have a picture of what you mean? Perhaps you can smooth out the terrain, after loading it?


grindalf(Posted 2009) [#12]
[img http://i269.photobucket.com/albums /]
theres one In this case I know what im doing wrong, getting the distance from the pixel im checking to the pixel at the center of the hill(a diagonal counts as 1.5) which then gives me this shape but I cant think of a way to make it better :(


Ross C(Posted 2009) [#13]
That link doesn't contain an image :)


grindalf(Posted 2009) [#14]
woops, my fault for not checking my own post.