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Text File | 1994-11-26 | 12KB | 346 lines

TERRAIN MAKER Version 1.1 Copyright 1994 Eric Jorgensen GENERAL DOCUMENTATION - DISCLAIMER Terrain Maker is not a guranteed product. It has been beta tested by about four dozen people, and no one has reported any damage, but there is no garuntee that it will not screw everything up and destroy someting important like your CPU. So basically, *** USE THIS SOFTWARE AT YOUR OWN RISK *** There. You have been warned. I feel much better now. - GENERAL INFORMATION - What is POV? POV stands for Persistance Of Vision. That is the title of a very amazing freeware raytracer. - what is Terrain Maker? Terrain Maker is a landscape editor. It offers powerful tools for creating and editing all kinds of landscapes that can be used as heightfields in POV. - picture formats and extensions Terrain Maker works only with gif (87a spec.) files. Height fields saved by Terrain Maker have the extension .ghf (Gif Heightfield). Terrain Maker can import any image as long as it is in gif format. - Using the mouse with Terrain Maker. Terrain Maker is fully mouse driven. To activate any button on the screen , simply move the mouse cursor over it and click any mouse button once. To use any of the drawing tools on the heightfield, simply hold down one of the mouse buttons while the cursor is in the heightfield work area. - using slider tools Slider tools look like the scrollbars used in many Windoze applications. To use a slider, you can press a mouse button while the cursor is on the square in the middle of the tool and drag it around to change the particular value associated with tho tool, or you can click on one of the arrows to change the value by one unit. - Hot keys. If you see a yellow letter on a button, you can access that button by pressing that letter! YAY! - Available functions and video memory. Terrain Maker likes to use to two video pages at 800x600x256 resolution. This means that your video card should have at least 1 MEG of video ram. Terrain Maker will still work on cards with only half that, but certain functions will be unavailable. Specifically, these functions are: pseudo 3D undo remember lava Note: some video cards do not perform page flipping properly. See TROUBLE.TXT for details. - WINDOWS Terrain Maker does not behave well under Windows. Exit to DOS before you use it. - MAIN MENU The main menu is the springboard for all of Terrain Maker's functions. These are the controls you will find on the main menu along with descriptions of what they do: - GENERATE This will be the starting place for most of your lanscape projects. The generate button spawns the random landscape engine which will fill the entire buffer with a random landscape based on the parameters set from the main menu. (See "density" and "smoothness" sliders below) - TEST This functions exactly like "generate" except that it only uses 1/16 of the buffer. This is so you can get an idea of what the generated terrain will look like without having to render the entire buffer. - LOAD This allows you to load a heightfield from the disk. When you press this button, Terrain Maker searches for any heightfields (.ghf extension) in the current directory, then creates an individual button for each one of them. When you press a button, that particular heightfield will be loaded into memory. When you have finished choosing the one you want, simply click on the "done" button. - SAVE This allows you to save the currently displayed height field. You will be prompted for an eight character (or less) filename. Terrain Maker will automatically add a ".ghf" extension. - MODIFY This brings up the "modify heightfield" menu. (See next section.) This allows you to perform various editing features on the terrain. - PSEUDO 3D This function activates a menu which allows you to view a 3-D image of the current heightfield in color and from different angles. - IMPORT This button allows you to load any gif file into the heightfield buffer. Terrain Maker looks for gif files (.gif extension) in the current directory and creates a button for each file. When a button is pressed, a frame pops up which you can move around on the screen. when you have picked the spot where you would like the gif to be placed, click any mouse button once. Terrain Maker will then place the image and convert intensity values to height values. (Black = 0 altitude, White = Highhest altitude. This can produce some interesting effects if you use photographs.) - COLOR MAP Many people use the heightfield gif for a texture map as well. The color map editor allows you to change the colors of your heightfield to look like different landscapes. - QUIT Guess what happens when you press this button? - parameters There are three parameter sliders avaiable from the main menu. These are used to affect some of the buttons on the main menu: - DESITY This parameter controls how close together The mountains are when the heightfield is generated. A very low density will cause a smooth transition from corner to corner. A Very high density will generate something that looks like a satellite view of the Alps. - SMOOTHNESS This parmeter controls the point-to-point variation of the landscape generator. A very low smoothness will cause the lanscape to have lots of bumps and wrinkles. A very high smoothness generates an even, sloping Terrain Maker. Because if the way the land generation algorythm is set up, smoothness has a mild inverse relationship with density. (ie: lowering smoothness tends to increase density.) - SEA LEVEL This slider simply controls where the pseudo 3D function clips the heighfield for a simulated ocean effect. When you use this slider, Terrain Maker highlights the heightfield to show you exactly where the cut will take place. - Locating coordinates While in the main menu, you can click on the height field buffer to locate specific coordinates. Terrain Maker shows two sets of coordinates on the bottom of the screen: The first set are absolute coordinates- X,Y,Altitude. The second set are coordinates that POV uses for heigtfields. - MODIFICATION MENU The modification menu provides access to all of the landscape modification tools in Terrain Maker. - tools The upper left grouping of buttons on the modification menu are the tools that you can use. To select a tool, simply press the button with it's name. Terrain Maker higlights te tool to indicate that it is in use. All tools are affected in some way by the four parameters (see below) that are represented by sliders on the lower half of the modify menu. All tools are available in paint mode, but only some are available in "do all" mode. Thhe tool descriptions below will indicate which ones these are. Here is a listing of available tools and what they do: - smooth This tool smooths out altitude variations in the heightfield. - raise This tool raises the altittude of eightfield points. - lower Opposite of Raise. - erode This tool simulates erosion by moving a point "downill" and subtracting altitude as it goes. These "raindrops" are spawing randomly withing the circle define by the brush shape. This function does not work in "do all" mode. - level This function pushes altitude values toward the level indicated by the level slider. (ie: if the level in the level slider is 100, values below 100 will be raised and values above 100 will be lowered.) - rough This function randomly displaces the altitude of points in the heigtfield. - lava This creates long blobby shapes that go downhill. Does not work in "do all" mode. - dirt This works like the erode function, except that Terrain Maker randomly sprinkles "dirt" instead of "raindrops". The dirt particles roll downhill and generally come to rest in pits and crevices. Doesn't work all that swell. Doesn't work in "do all" mode. - paint Quick and dirty altitude adjustment. Paints whatever level is indicated by the level slider onto the heightfield. Use this tool in "do all" mode to clear the landscape. - expand opposite of level. - using tools Using tools is very simple. Once you have selected a tool, you can use it in paint mode simply by pressing and holding down the mouse button wile the cursor is in the heightfield buffer. Or you can press the "do all" button and apply the tool to the entire landscape. (Some tools do not work in "do all" mode. See tool descriptions above.) - undo Terrain Maker keeps a copy of te current heightfield on the second video page. (If it exists) Pressing the undo button copies the heightfield from the second page to the first page, effectively undoing any changes to the image. Your video card must support page flipping in order use this function. - remember Remember is the opposite of undo: it copies te heigtfield from the first (visible) page to the second page. This will make permanent any changes you have made to the image. - do all As explained above in [using tools], the "do all" button applies the current tool to the entire landscape. - invert Destruction of biblical proportions. Mountains become valleys and valleys become mountains. That kind of stuff. - parameters There are four parameters available to you that allow you to alter the behavior of the modification tools. Only a few tools are sensitive to all four parameters. - brush size This is basically the area of affect for the tool when used in paint mode. The graphic next to this tool indicates the exact size the brush will be. - brush intensity This controls the magnitude of the effect of most tools. - brush rate This controls how rapidly the tool is applied when in paint mode. Setting the brush rate to 1 puts the current tool in single step mode. - level This is the numerical value used by tools that need to refernce a particular altitude. (ie: paint and level) -THE COLOR EDITOR When you select the color editor, you will see the windows with graphs idicating the intensities of Red, Green, and Blue component colors in the palette, plus some miscellaneous buttons. - Editing component colors To edit a color, simply click the mouse on one of the graphs and "paint" new values. - Smooth button Pressing this button averages colors locally to smooth any steps in the palette. - Save button Pressing this button lets you save the current colormap rgb values in a text file. (extension .rgb - Load button This lets you import a colormap from an rgb file, gif, or heigtfield. To select the import source, click the appropriate radio button: RGB, GIF, or GHF. -PSEUDO 3D MENU - View From: Each of these four buttons will generate a 3D rendering of the heightfield buffer. The placement of the "camera" depends o which button you push: To the TOP, BOTTOM, LEFT or RIGHT. - Sea Level This slider allows you to control the altitude where the heightfield is "clipped" and turned into water. - Height Scaling This slider controls the verticle scaling that the "View From" buttons use to render the heightfield. 0 = flat. 100 = pointy. - TROUBLESHOOTING Please see the file TROUBLE.TXT for information on troubleshooting.