This dialog controls the generation of the texture for the landscape. The texturing engine works on the principle of layers.
There are two types of layer:
N.B. You must press Generate Button at the top of the dialog to actually create a texture in this dialog.
These texture layers combine to create the overall texture. You can see an example of layers in the dialog below.
There are 10 layers in this project. Each layer is associated with a texture image and has a height range. The height range specifies where in the overall texture when it is generated the layer texture is used. The heights are based on the terrain in the heightmap. You can see that texture layers may be overlapped. The height range runs from -1 to 1. Highlighting a texture layer in the list gives a view of the image associated with the layer. Pressing the preview button gives you an visual guide of how the layer will affect the overall texture. Selecting multiple layers and pressing the preview button shows how the selected layers will combine. You can also view this in a 3d preview accessible from the preview dialog. The checkbox next to a layer signifies whether the layer is enabled or disabled layer. Disabled layers take no part in the generation process. The user may quickly turn on and off the layers by clicking on the checkbox.
Pressing change or add in the layer section, brings up the layer edit dialog.
Height Scale: This is how many "real world" units there are in one height unit.
Tile Size: This the width of the landscape tile in "real world" units.
Water Height: How high the water will appear on the landscape tile in "real world" units.
Details: A summary of the various scales.
The values above are also editable in the settings dialog available from the main dialog.
Height Normalisation
The layers use a normalised height scale that runs from -1 to 1. -1 is the lowest value of the current heightmap and 1 is the highest value of the heightmap.
If you wish to specify a maximum height for the highest value instead of retreiving this from the current heightmap, select the Use Explicit Value and enter the specified height. This is useful if you are creating several heightmap tiles and wish to use the highest value from the one of these to generate the textures on all the others, so all the generated textures are uniform.
This panel allows the user to preview the current heightmap layer. Please see the Heightmap section for more information.
Generate: Create a preview of the current heightmap layer.
Save: Save the preview file to disk.
Stop: Stop the generation of a layer.
There is always a mimimum of one heightmap layer. This is the heightmap generated in the terrain editor. The user may add additional masks to add specific areas that are textured differently from the rest of the heightmap. Each layer may have many texture layers.
Create Mask: Adds a new heightmap layer.
Edit Mask: Edits the currently selected heightmap layer.
Options...: Edits the blending options for the current mask.
View Paint...: shows the texture painted on the terrain for that layer by the paint tool.
Delete Mask: Removes the currently selected heightmap layer.
Import: Allows the user to import a .gts file which contains a list of texture layers. This will add to the existing texture layers in the current heightmap layer.
Export: Allows the user to export the texture layers of the current heightmap layer.
Check the lighting option if you wish to light the generated terrain.
Light Direction: Allows the user to specify the light direction using x, y, z values. This can also be set by the sun position box.
Sun Direction: Click on the X, Z box to specify the direction of the light source. Use the Y to specify the height on the conceptual skydome.
Light Influence: Specifies how strong the light source is. Left is less powerful, right is more.
Shadows: Toggles whether overall texture has shadows placed on it based on the position of the light source.
Soft boundaries: When checked this softens ( smoothes ) the edges of the shadows on the texture. The user may specify the amount of softness using the slider.
Output texture size: Sets the resolution of the generated texture. The larger this is the better the quality of the output, but the longer it takes to generate. This is also editable in the settings dialog available from the main dialog.
Show Progress: toggles whether the generation process outputs the preview bitmaps to provide visual feedback. Unchecking this box will increase the speed of the texture generation.
This is the area to generate the texture for the landscape.
Generate: Generate all texture layers and merge them together into one overall texture.
Save: Save the generated texture to disk.
Stop: Stop the generation of the texture.
3d view: Preview the texture before returning to the terrain editor dialog.