by paul » Wed Jun 10, 2009 2:56 am
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