Device help

Bug Reports
#1

Any estimate on when the device reference will be out?

I would like to understand the select height device. I’ve experimented with it, but since there is no tooltip help in it, I’m really running into problems.

I’ve concluded this is what I need from reading other posts. What I’m trying to do is build a mask from an input bmp which has 10 discrete colors. What I want is to build a mask for each of those 10 colors to control other devices. I’ve figured out how to use the chooser just fine.
–Dale–

#2

Hi Dale,

hopefully soon. Now that 1.2 is released, that is my primary focus over the next week to get the DevRef shaped up and released.

One thing that will do just what you’re looking for is the Height Splitter. Set the number of levels in the Height Splitter to equal the number of outputs you want to produce, hook up the file input to the Height Splitter, and the device will split up the input mask so that each height band will produce a mask that is outputted on one of the mask outputs and selects only those areas that are within that band.

#3

I have tried that. Another post said that the height splitter makes n equal bands of height. My input map doesn’t have n equally-spaced discrete colors throughout the color-space for a height map.

I think I need the select height filter, but I can’t figure out how to get the thing to work, and there are no tooltips for it.

Thanks for the answer, but it doesn’t work. To confirm that it doesn’t, I wired each output of the splitter to a bias/gain with bias=.5 and gain=1 (to make it pure black/white). This I wired into a chooser using select a where white and b where black. I wired input a up to a constant of 1.0 and b up to a constant of 0. The output of this chooser was of a uniform height rather than a mask for one of the colors present.
–Dale–

#4

any RGB bitmap won’t retain its colors once its imported – it will be shifted to greyscale. Thus, the task is to pick a shade of grey from the input file, not a color.

You’re correct, if your shades are not evenly distributed then you cannot use the Height Splitter. In that case, the best method is to wire the output of the File Input to a regular Splitter (set to 10 outputs) and to each one of those outputs connect a Height Selector. Set the Fuzziness value very low, and the two sliders (representing min, max values) close together, and move them around until each selector is picking out the correct shade of grey from the input mask. This is obviously pretty laborious, but if the colors are not evenly distributed is the best that can be done.

It’s also required of course, that two input RGB colors not map to the same greyscale value. If that is so, then you’re going to have to shift the colors beforehand to remove the overlap (although if you have that ability, it would make sense to just shift them to be even tones of grey so that you can use the Height Splitter!)

#5

Yes, I knew I’d have the color to greyscale problem, and I think I can get around that. What I’m trying to do is make a world builder to where the user can paint a bitmap in particular colors (darkest blue for ocean trench, lighter for ocean basins, light blue for continental shelf, white for land, two different blues for inland seas and major lakes, brown for hills, and grey for mountains). The macro would then take this and build a world with those specifications. I wanted intuitive colors for the different terrains and not just arbitrary grays.
–Dale–

#6

That sounds like a very cool macro idea… I’m eager to see what you can come up with. Let me know if the above method works acceptably.

#7

What is a good filter to remove noise? By noise, if you look at a mask and it has a couple of isolated gray dots in addition to what you want, how can you remove those dots?

#8