3D Design
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Artifice 3D Design Community Discussion |
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Posted by Mike Wheeler on October 27, 1997 at 10:01:49:
The DesignWorkshop Terrain Machine has recently been improved in some ways which you might find useful.
* It's Easier To Use
You will find that the Terrain Machine is now easier to use, because it has been made more forgiving to minor inconsistencies in input data. If a spot-height value is missing, or if a row has an extra number value, the Terrain Machine will now interpolate or crop so a valid terrain block can be produced. Similarly, a blank line at the end of the data will now simply be ignored.
* Make Terrain from Grayscale Values
For users who would like to try something new, the Terrain Machine now supports translation into 3D relief for grayscale terrain images, using the simple utility "Email Effects" (included on the DesignWorkshop 1.7 CD-ROM, and available from http://www.sigsoftware.com) as an intermediate converter from grayscale to ASCII text.
The first step in this approach is to create or obtain a grayscale image of your terrain, such that the lightness of each pixel corresponds to it's elevation. In other words, the darker a pixel is, the lower its elevation, and the lighter a pixel is, the higher its elevation.
The next step is to copy and paste the grayscale image into Email Effects. When a grayscale terrain image is pasted into Email Effects, each image pixel is converted into an ASCII text character representing the brightness of the pixel.
The third step is to copy and paste the ASCII text from Email Effects into the data field of the Terrain Machine. Then click the make terrain button to produce the matching DesignWorkshop terrain block.
Note that since each pixel in the grayscale image is converted to a character in Email Effects, and then each character is converted to a model vertex in the Terrain Machine, there will be a vertex in the output model for EVERY pixel in the source image. Therefore, it is important to keep your source image fairly small. A 50 x 50 pixel image will have 2500 vertices when it is made into a terrain. This is about as detailed as we would usually go with a single terrain block. (Of course extensive detailed landscapes can be assembled as a collection of smaller blocks).
Mike