lakes!

[71__cuda]

i'm having trouble making my own custom lakes and thought others might be having the same problem. so if you can make lakes and want to share, post a link here

[paul]

Great question - Has anbody created any lakes? It's been pretty queit since the beta release. Any specific problems or questions about custom lakes? I'd love to see what folks are working on.

Paul

[Fisherman]

I found my current graphics editor wouldn't do grayscale, and looked around until I got Paint Shop Pro 9, one I used to work with. I downloaded and am fiddling with the 3d terrain builder you mentioned. It seems a bit tweeky, but the key I guess is porting over a finished grayscale map. I also went to various satellite photo sites, and got copies of pictures to study of a few lakes I want to do. That part is pretty cool, as the photos are of high quality and one can zoom down and really see a lake.
That has taken a few days to sort out, and that's where I am at the moment. On vacation, so I hope to make some progress on a test lake. It is not a lot of progress, I suppose, and maybe I am making it more complicated than it is. Maybe you know how to edit the 3d map in the first, non 3d image screen? That would help to rough out a sketch of a lake. The documentation seems a bit thin.

[paul]

I don't believe L3DT gives you a way to edit the heightfield directly except in the 3D view, but you can export the heightfield bitmap, edit it in any image editor, and them import it back into L3Dt.

As for the color/grayscale issue, I suppose it's quite possible that an image could actually be saved in a full-color format and work with the 3D engine in the game as a heightfield. The image file would be 3 times as large as it needs to be (24 bit RGB color instead of 8 bit grayscale) but the engine seems pretty flexible about image formats in general, so if your preferred image editor doesn't handle grayscales you might want to try drawing a simple heightfield, save as a color bitmap and see if it works.

Getting the right amount of information in the lake creation tutorial is tricky. I actually recorded the whole thing 3 or 4 times, and I'm still not completely happy with it. I'd like to go through the steps and demonstrate the whole process without racing along like an auctioneer, but on the other hand I don't want to end up with an 8 hour long tutorial. I'd suggest trying something really simple first, just a trivial heightfield and texture image, just to get the feel for it. I'd dabble in that for a while before getting into the splatting layers and more realistic heightfields from L3DT.

Paul