Hello!

When I import a (Greyscale) Heightmap into MED and scale the resulting terrain in order to get more height, I end up with unwanted stairs. This happens because there are only 256 grey values, which is not very much. Even if I do all possible blurring before the import, there will be visible stairs in the terrain:



In order to correct these stairs I would recommend - in addition to the magnet tool - some kind of smooth-brush, that moves the influenced vertices to an average position. Such a tool would be very useful.

Amen. BTW try earthsculptor(free)...there's a link in editing levels I believe.

Yes. We'll implement the import of 16 or 24 bit greyscale images for terrain. But at the moment, there's the following simple method: Import the terrain as a normal model from .X, .3DS or the like, and then convert the model to terrain. This should work fine when it's a regular grid.

Meaning so long as the verts are evenly spaced on x, y, correct?

Yes.

You can also use colored heightmaps.

Thanks for all response!
MED is already capable of importing colored hightmaps, and I experimented with this feature. This gives me more than 16 million hight values instead of 256 and I could make of course very fine slopes, without the stairs I mentioned above.
But is there a terraineditor, that exports such heightmaps? This would be the perfect solution.
I use earthsculptor but it exports only grey values, which is the bottleneck. Does anybody know of a workflow with colored heightmaps? I mean a terrain editor, that can export them? Is there a common standard for the weighting of the colors?

I hope, this doesn´t sound too complicated, I´m actually searching for a good workflow.
For the moment it might be - as Jcl suggested - the best method to make models and convert them to terrain. But nevertheless I would like the implementation of a "smoothing tool" in MED ...

i've coded a terrain editor which is capable of that... just follow the link in my signature (www.phosphor-games.de.tc), there you can download the terrain generator.

I'm not jcl, but I'm pretty shure it will still only read the brightness value...how close those colors are to white or black...correct me if I am wrong.
the only use I would see for RGB HMP's is if the RGB istoted the terrain in x-y also..as in concave areas perpendicular to the walking surface.

Hi!
Thanks. I´ve downloaded your editor, it looks very interesting. I will have to do some more testing, but from first impression it seems to create random hightmaps. Basically I need a tool, where I can create the terrain with roads and so on in a more intentional way (for RPG type game). Is there a recommended import setting for color weighting in MED?

@ nowherebrain:

When I import a colored bitmap in MED I can change the values for the RGB-channels:



This results in a different translation for the individual RGB channels.
I made a test and some terrains in which I used R*2 / G*10 / B*50.
In order to find out what happens, I imported a testmap:



The scaled up result in MED looks like this:



This gave me a range of hightvalues for

Red: 0-16,5
Green: 0-82.6
Blue: 0-412,9

These values will however depend on the size of the terrain.

The whole point about this is: I get a bigger and finer range of hightvalues.
I can use different colors for different purposes.
So I could avoid the stairs (see the pic from the first post), and I could create a terrain with great mountains but also fine details and there is also an advantage, when I create several terrain-cells that form a huge terrain with different areas.
It´s a little bit difficult to explain. But if you make a big gradient with grey values or one color alone it looks smooth for the eye, but in reality there are just 256 different values, and - especially, when the terrain is scaled up - there will be stairs, when there is a change.

So I hope, that there is a terrain editor somewhere in the universe, that can translate hightvalues in a colored picture with 24 bit. The best solution would be a common standard ...