The auto-terrain tool is used to generate realistic landscapes using the Perlin Noise Engine in Geoscape3d.
Press the Update Preview button, or F5 key, to regenerate the heightmap from the current settings. Pressing the Ok button places automatically generated terrain into the heightmap editor so the user may fine tune it with the landscaping tools.
Zoom Reset resets the preview to the full extents of the texture and light toggles on and off a light source for the preview. Turning the Mouse Wheel on the preview zooms in and out of the preview.
Presets allow the user to store a set of terrain settings so that the same terrain may be regenerated again. Choose from the preset list and press the load button or double click the item in the list to select that setting. This will also generate a preview of the terrain.
Use the delete button to remove a setting.
This tab allows you to select from a pre-defined texture setting that will specify which texture layers get placed into the current project.
Add Textures: allows the user to add one of the pre-created texture settings to the current terrain. Turning off this setting, means the auto-terrain tool will not create a default texture.
Category: Select
the required category from the list box to see the pre-defined texture settings
from that group appear in the listbox.
Preset Textures: Select
from the list the required pre-defined texture settings for the new terrain.
Preview: Turn on to see a two-dimensional preview
of the texture to be generated.
To set up the pre-defined textures, please use the Preset Terrain Textures dialog.
N.B. This will remove any existing
texture settings from your current project.
These settings are all the user needs to create terrain. A description of each follows:
Name: The name of the current settings selected.
Save: Lets the user save the current settings into the preset list. The user must specify a name. If the user has already selected a preset, keeping the name the same will overwrite the setting of the same name with the current settings in the dialog. The dialog will remember the last settings used even if they are not saved.
Terrain Types
Each type changes the algorithm that generates textures. The following types are available:
Mode: This specifies how the current heightmap in the terrain editor will be affected by the newly generated heightmap.
The following options are available:
Height Range: Specifies the how many heightmap units there are between the minimum to maximum height. Raising this makes the peaks and troughs much higher and deeper.
Regenerate Texture: When checked, the texture will automatically be regenerated from the current texture settings.
Seamless Tile: When checked, if you place the heightmap next to itself there will be no discontinuity between the shared edge.
Scale X: The larger the scale the more condensed the features are on the terrain.
Scale Y: The larger the scale the more condensed the features are on the terrain.
Shift X / Shift Y: To allow the user to create very large seamless terrains, tiles whose heights values at the edges match with the edges of the "neighbouring" tile. You can specify a notional "grid" position. So ( 0,0 ) will match to ( 0,1 ), ( 1,0 ) and so on.
Random Seed: Changing this alters the base value the terrain is generated from and therefore alters the generated terrain totally.
Displacement: Affects the severity of ridges. Smaller numbers mean gentler terrains.
Advanced: Takes the user to the advanced settings for the terrain generation.
These settings provide an extra level of control over the generator algorithms. Although a knowledge of Perlin Noise would be useful to understand how these settings work, it is not required to use the dialog.
Frequency: 1/ wavelength of the noise waves.
Persistence: A single number used to specify the amplitude of each frequency.
Octaves: The number of noise waves.
Offset: Determines the strength of the "multifractality".
Ridge Size: ( Ridged MF only ) The larger the number, the more ridges become pronounced.