How do you edit Terrain Height maps directly?

[corthew]

I'm not really looking to edit it outside of the terrain editor in MS but I want to be able to draw the details on my terrain image file and its easier if I do it on an alpha layer overlaid onto the heightmap.

I've tried opening it in paint and gimp with no luck. I tried renaming it to a bmp and a dds for editing, also with no luck.

Has anyone figured it out yet?

Or even been curious other than me?

MS staff, if you're around...without much trouble do you off the top of your head know?

If not it can wait but if so, please share.

[corthew]

Thought I'd bump this one back to the top in case any staff stops in for a bit.

[corthew]

Another bump.

I'll be glad when staff returns. I wish I got long holidays.

[rampa]

Had a go at it. Inside your movie's folder you will find a PNG file. Open this up in your favorite paint app and take a look. It only contains four colors; black, red, blue, green. You can paint with any of these colors. You can also make this file much larger if you wish. It is 512 by default, but I ran it at 2048.

After editing, reload the movie in MS and go to the terrain editor. You will see new painting in the chosen tile colors. Select new colors in the four options to change what color tiles are mapped to the terrain.

The relationship of colors to tiles is:

left-most tile will be black in the PNG.
Next will be blue.
Next will be green.
The right-most tile will be red.

See the attached file.

This only for texturing, it is not a height-map. Terrain needs to be shaped in-program.

Attached File(s)

 Terrain_for_Set_for_scene_1.png ( 8.54K ) Number of downloads: 13

 

[corthew]

This only for texturing, it is not a height-map. Terrain needs to be shaped in-program.

Thanks, Rampa but I've already been doing that.

http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/community/inde...p;vid_id=107773

That is a terrain I put together from textures in Gimp, overwriting the one in the movie folder.

But I want snow caps and darkened valleys and its next to impossible to get it to match up without access to the height-map.

[rampa]

Can you take a birds-eye picture of the terrain in the camera view, maybe? That would give a reference of sorts.

[corthew]

Can you take a birds-eye picture of the terrain in the camera view, maybe? That would give a reference of sorts.

I can't get high enough. And even then there would be an issue with perspective with the mountains hiding the positions of low lying areas.

I'm hoping there is a way to view the actual height map MovieStorm creates. It is beginning to look like they created their own array system for creating and interpreting it but if that's true, maybe they could release a small utility that could reproduce an image of it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who will benefit from the ability to paint the landscape to match the terrain.

[primaveranz]

I can't get high enough.

Shucks. You just ain't tryin' hard enough.

[keithlawrence]

I can't get high enough.

High enough for you?

[corthew]

High enough for you?

If you can do that with a directly overhead looking straight down view, then I'll be impressed.


I double-dog-dare you.

But it still would not solve the perspective issue.

You'd have to get so high that zooming all the way in would still show the whole map.

You're good, Keith...REAL good...But not THAT good.

[keithlawrence]

You're good, Keith...REAL good...But not THAT good.

Oh, how I hate those four last words

[Ben_S]

I'm not aware of the exact format, but the height map presumably either stores the height of all the vertexes for the terrain in a specific order. I have no idea if Dave used a standarised format for it, though.

[corthew]

I'm not aware of the exact format, but the height map presumably either stores the height of all the vertexes for the terrain in a specific order. I have no idea if Dave used a standarised format for it, though.

Fingers crossed here.

[corthew]

On the hope that staff is returning from their almost two week long vacation from us, , I thought I'd bump this back to the top to see if Dave could reveal his secrets.

[corthew]

Thought I'd bump this back up to see if Dave has revealed his secret yet.

[Ben_S]

It's of the format:
Int (xsize)
Int (ysize)
Float (Gridsize)
Float (x origin)
Float (y origin)
And then a list of Float values for each point in the grid, starting with x=0 and running through each y coordinate.

It appears that both ints and floats are written as 4 byte values with the high byte first.

[corthew]

It's of the format:
Int (xsize)
Int (ysize)
Float (Gridsize)
Float (x origin)
Float (y origin)
And then a list of Float values for each point in the grid, starting with x=0 and running through each y coordinate.

It appears that both ints and floats are written as 4 byte values with the high byte first.

Just so you know, I don't have a clue what that means.

I showed it to my son though and he said, "Oh. that makes sense."

So he's going to try to write a small utility to view them.

Or print them to a gray-scale file.

[Ben_S]

It means that the file is a big list of numbers. The first two say how big the grid is, the third says how big the squares are, the fourth and fifth say where the origin is, and the next x*y entries say the heights at each of the grid points.

I think the first 5 numbers should be the same for each htmap for Moviestorm.

[corthew]

It means that the file is a big list of numbers. The first two say how big the grid is, the third says how big the squares are, the fourth and fifth say where the origin is, and the next x*y entries say the heights at each of the grid points.

I think the first 5 numbers should be the same for each htmap for Moviestorm.

That I get.