10-21-2006, 12:18 AM
Heightmapping is a very important part of any large-scale landmass mod, for obvious reasons. Every Beyond Cyrodiil mod and Silgrad Tower itself need them!
If anyone has any tips for using GeoControl or just heightmapping in general, please share them with your fellow heightmappers.
I'll start off with a GeoControl tip (using the latest version, 1.13a; the demo has also been updated to this version and it uses a different evaluation time tracking method, so you can use the demo again for another month even if you've used up an earlier version of the demo). The cut tool is VERY useful. What it does is it crops out a section of the heightmap, and resizes it to the size of the heightmap you cut it out of. Of course, the upscale filter isn't flawless and so you should do more filter work afterward. Before, most heightmappers would do each quad completely individually of each other and hope they fit together semi-decently. Using the cut tool, you can just make a 1024x1024 (or higher resolution) heightmap of the whole landmass you are mapping with filtering, save it (though, I would export it as some sort of file type rather than save it as a project settings file so you don't have to go through the whole generation process each time you load it), and then cut out specific areas and work on them with more filter work. Doing a heightmap this way removes almost all of the guesswork in getting quads to fit together well.
If anyone has any tips for using GeoControl or just heightmapping in general, please share them with your fellow heightmappers.
I'll start off with a GeoControl tip (using the latest version, 1.13a; the demo has also been updated to this version and it uses a different evaluation time tracking method, so you can use the demo again for another month even if you've used up an earlier version of the demo). The cut tool is VERY useful. What it does is it crops out a section of the heightmap, and resizes it to the size of the heightmap you cut it out of. Of course, the upscale filter isn't flawless and so you should do more filter work afterward. Before, most heightmappers would do each quad completely individually of each other and hope they fit together semi-decently. Using the cut tool, you can just make a 1024x1024 (or higher resolution) heightmap of the whole landmass you are mapping with filtering, save it (though, I would export it as some sort of file type rather than save it as a project settings file so you don't have to go through the whole generation process each time you load it), and then cut out specific areas and work on them with more filter work. Doing a heightmap this way removes almost all of the guesswork in getting quads to fit together well.