Terrain Offset/.r32 editing.

Bug Reports
#1

Hi, was wondering if there is any way to offset a terrain you’ve created in Worldmachine.

For example you have a terrain, you are fond of the eastern half of it, but not the western half. You decide that the best thing to do would be to eliminate the western half, move the eastern half over and add new terrain on the space formerly occupied by the eastern half.

Is there any way to do this?

If not, is there a way to edit the .r32 file? (basically create the offset in there so I could bring it back into Worldmachine with the desired offset).

Thanks in advance for any help.

#2

are you using it with terragen? (i dunno how many WM use it for TG)

#3

Nah, are you able to do offset operations with an r32 in Terragen? (then save it back out for WorldMachine?)

#4

The easiest way to do an offset in World Machine would be to use the displacement device.

Take your terrain you want to move over, hook it up to the primary input of the displacement dev. Then hook up a Constant Generator set to 1.0 to the other input of the displacer. Then open up the displacement properties, and you can set the angle and amount of displacement of the terrain.

With a little more work (perhaps using a gradient device and height chooser) you can blank out the new area and drop some extra terrain in there.

The other method (have you tried it yet?) is to open up the size control dialog, and use the Perlin original panning tools to simply pan the terrain over until you’re satisfied with where it is. This won’t work if your terrain uses any Generators other than perlin gens, but it it is alot simpler than any other method.

#5

Thanks for the response!

hrmm… I did not see any device named Displacement (Under any of the pull down menus) could I be looking in the wrong place?

O also don’t see any Constant Generators under HeightMap Operators->Generators (I only see Standard Perlin and File Input)

I can’t use the Perlin method (though I wish I could) because I am bringing an .r32 in via File Input and want to offset this. I don’t actually need to run any other devices on it, it could go from a straight input to an output, if I could somehow apply a transformation/offset on it.

Could you point me to the Displacement Device that you are talking about?

I apologize if this is a stupid question. :slight_smile:

#6

It should be in Heightfield Operators -> Filters.

if its not there, are you sure you’re using Version 0.99 of World Machine?

#7

Stephen answered it! :slight_smile:

There were two things I learned here also… :slight_smile:

  • There might be a solution simpler than the one I come up with (Ok, I admitt I already knew this one, but I keep forgetting)
  • And… to check for answers before answering… :slight_smile: I ended up devising a complete answer and posting at the mailinglist when the anwer was right here… :slight_smile:

Anyway, now the guys at the yahoo group now it as well :stuck_out_tongue:

Cheers,

#8

Ok, just to make it available here as well, here was my suggestion… It’s most a repetition of what Stephen said, but this one has more details in case anyone doesn’t get it right at first… I also metion a caveat for it…

So to answer your second question, do the following in Worldmachine:
  • create a “Displacement” filter device and a “Constant” generator device.
  • set the constant device’s parameter (height) to 1 (double-click the device to do that)
  • connect your terrain (for instance a File Input that reads your .r32 file) to the first port (primary input) of the displacement device, and connect the constant generator to the second port of the displacement.
  • Check the preview display to see if that is what you want and how you want it: Double-click the displacement device to specify a different direction or any other parameter… Oh, and don’t forget to set the strength parameter to 1, otherwise it won’t do anything. :slight_smile:

By now you should have the right half on the left side the only thing left to do is to eliminate the repeeated heights where you what to make it flat. To do that, the simplest way (*) is to get a gradient and use a height-selector to select the right half to be “painted” flat, and then use a chooser to choose between the terrain and the “flat stuff”. Ok do it like this:

  • Get a gradient: set it’s direction so that the up-slope points to the direction of the half you whant to make flat (this probably corresponds to Direction=0)
  • Get a height selector, that selects from .5 to 1 with no fuzziness (double click the selector, and move the right slider all the way up, then move the fuzziness slider all the way left and click OK.
  • voila, you should see a chcolate-and-cream vertical bars on your preview, yammy :wink:

Ok, so where are we? we have a terrain with one half to be flatted, and we have something that can be used to choose what gets flatted and wht doesn’t. Now we need to combine these things using: a chooser!

Right, create a choose device, and another constant generator. Set the constant’s parameters so you get the desired height for your “flatness”. Connect your terrain (the half-one) to the first port of the chooser. connect the constant device that will be the “flat stuff” to the second port of the chooser. Finally conect the selector device to the chooser’s third port…

Bingo! This should be it! use a file output device to save your result, and the half-flat half-ok terrain recepy should be finished!

(*) the caveat of this approach is that it assumes it is HALF a terrain you what to make flat… If you decide in the future to make it only 1/3 of the terrain, you have to change this tmd, in two places: the displacement and the selector… (to avoid this, one could displace the result of the seletion of the gradient in a simmillar manner as to the original terrain)

Any problems or any questions post again :wink:

#9

It’s odd… the version we are using is .99 but it is missing all of the features you guys described.

I just DL’ed the .99 from the website and lo and behold. It has EXACTLY what I needed. THANK YOU!