Re: Blue Mountains revamp
Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2019 7:52 pm
Lol. Umm, I just figured out that MicroDEM has some extra useful bits I hadn't used before. There's no need to try and do terrain painting for elevation manually. MicroDEM has an "Automatic chloropath palette" option under Modify > Elevation (the same window you use to select your DBF export tables). This gives a wide range of additional palettes for terrain, and the basic "Terrain 25 steps" is near perfect for RT3 purposes.
The automatically gives an extremely good guide for cutting in rivers where you need them. If the map shows the same colour, that area is all in the same elevation range according to the actual DEM. It won't necessarily all be in the same elevation range when imported into RT3 though, because the default smoothing algorithm plays havoc with valleys sometimes. If you have a common situation where two side valleys for tributaries come into the main river valley, the smoothing algorithm will pull the main valley floor up as it tries to smooth the transition between the ridges on each side.
In that shot the lower parts of the main valley are roughly right for elevation, and it needs to be manually cut through at that height between the side ridges. Welcome to the traditional RT3 "Why haz my riverz got lumps in them?".
For comparison here's the same valley from the same heightmap, with the only difference being that no smoothing was applied when importing into RT3 editor.
The terrain is far more jagged but the heights through the valley, and for that matter over the peaks, are far more accurate when compared with the terrain elevation overlay. It just occurred to me that if you are using a smoothed import it could be worthwhile having an unsmoothed version for setting the lake tool for cutting valleys. You could load the unsmoothed version, set and write down a range of useful lake tool heights, then load the smoothed version and use the written heights as a guide for your terraforming. I can see this reducing the workload quite considerably.
At least the problem will be easier to fix with a good visual guide to the correct elevation ranges. Use the lake tool, set height from one of the correct vertices, cut through the lumps with a temporary strip of lake, set back to land, lay in your river.
Also this should now be in the Map Creation and/or Scenario Writing board. Not sure which, but will probably move it later.
The automatically gives an extremely good guide for cutting in rivers where you need them. If the map shows the same colour, that area is all in the same elevation range according to the actual DEM. It won't necessarily all be in the same elevation range when imported into RT3 though, because the default smoothing algorithm plays havoc with valleys sometimes. If you have a common situation where two side valleys for tributaries come into the main river valley, the smoothing algorithm will pull the main valley floor up as it tries to smooth the transition between the ridges on each side.
In that shot the lower parts of the main valley are roughly right for elevation, and it needs to be manually cut through at that height between the side ridges. Welcome to the traditional RT3 "Why haz my riverz got lumps in them?".
For comparison here's the same valley from the same heightmap, with the only difference being that no smoothing was applied when importing into RT3 editor.
The terrain is far more jagged but the heights through the valley, and for that matter over the peaks, are far more accurate when compared with the terrain elevation overlay. It just occurred to me that if you are using a smoothed import it could be worthwhile having an unsmoothed version for setting the lake tool for cutting valleys. You could load the unsmoothed version, set and write down a range of useful lake tool heights, then load the smoothed version and use the written heights as a guide for your terraforming. I can see this reducing the workload quite considerably.
At least the problem will be easier to fix with a good visual guide to the correct elevation ranges. Use the lake tool, set height from one of the correct vertices, cut through the lumps with a temporary strip of lake, set back to land, lay in your river.
Also this should now be in the Map Creation and/or Scenario Writing board. Not sure which, but will probably move it later.