How should I approach this?

Hi all.

Got a question. I’m making map where I draw some big rivers across the map, at this point the map is still as flat as a pie, but I need to make masks based on the rivers that flow through my map so I can kind of seperate different landpieces between the rivers.

By achieving this I can dictate what elements should be put where.

Here’s a simple example of a flat terrain got carved on the sides, and with the layout generator I made some rivers and used a simple displacement to make them look more ‘rivery’

(Just painted with mspaint but the idea seems clear)

Now’s the question, what would be the smartest or best approach to achieve what I want? certainly this cannot be done out of the box with a smart tool that can ‘detect’ this, so I would probably need to use ‘smart tricks’ to achieve this. Ofcourse the landpieces all the same flat altitude, as i later use a ‘select height’ device to place the actual base texture onto it with a ‘file input’.

Perhaps someone has any suggestions? :}

I think what you want is a segmentation tool, something that you could click on a given area and have it flood-fill to the boundaries and produce that as a mask.

Such a tool doesn’t exist in WM currently. Segmentation is an interesting problem given WM’s flexible nature (what happens when the input to the segmenter changes? When you segment only a subset of the whole? etc etc).

The manual alternative is to create each segment with the layout tool by drawing polygons for each region – this also gives you the ability to not make the regions be strictly delineated by the river.

mhh.

Was thinking of a device, a bit like the magic wand tool in photoshop, that could possibly detect stuff like this, perhaps based on a few criteria. Include that with some adjusting anti aliasing method and random seed etc :smiley:

Dunno thinking pretty weird now aye. I mean just with flat masks and black white separations it would probably not be that hard. Perhaps an idea for the future :slight_smile: