PLSM Map Creation Tutorial

What I'm looking for is something along the lines of someone creating something like a photoshop tutorial that will guide me through all the steps of taking a hightmap image, writing the splitter config files, writing the runtime configuration file with example files, the image that you used for the tutorial and an executable that uses the hightmap that was created.

This is something that I have not been able to find anywhere in the forums or in the wiki asside from an explanation of all the PLSM config file options. Would it be possible for someone with extensive experience with this scene manager to create such a tutorial? Does such a tutorial exist that I'm ignorant of?

Thanks a lot for your help, I love the idea of using this scene manager, but creating the maps for it seems like one of the most difficult parts.

I would be interested as well. I've only tried to bring in one heightmap thus far (a very large noise heightmap (raw) that would be perfect for a landscape), but it came in rather... jagged, putting it mildly.

I would be really cool if one of you who have actually used this tool with Ogre write down how to do this.

I noticed that L3DT exports a non-monochrome heightmap, which I had to convert in Gimp before using it.
Exporting it as raw made Ogre crash..


I'm planning on doing a wiki entry on integrating L3DT's output into PLSM2, but work has been rough recently. Maybe I'll find some free time this weekend to get it started at least...

I've opened the heightmap in Photoshop before. It is a 16-bit gray scale raw file, which should definitely be usable.

The website for L3DT actually has pretty good documentation on all of their file formats (a lot of them are very "RIFF"-like), and for many of the files there's an exporter to something more familiar.

Kentamanos wrote that here: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=16912&highlight=l3dt

But as he's a busy man right now, maybe someone else having experience using l3dt could start the wiki page off?

I'd even be interested in something that takes a photoshop rendered image using the Difference Clouds rendering filter (looks just like a randomly generated heightmap) and takes that image through the process of splatting it, splitting it, and bringing it into the PLSM so it can be viewed. Although a tutorial using L3DT would be cool too, but isn't the current mapeditor that Falagard is making doing something similar to this, or is he only adding functionality for GOOF?

I'm currently focusing on GOOF, not on terrain editing. The terrain editing portion of the editor hasn't changed in over a year since Lucky Luciano first implemented it, and I'm going to get into the terrain editing portion eventually, but at the moment no new functionality exists.

The existing functionality included pieces for importing a heightmap and splitting it automatically, but had the .raw import commented out.

Probably wouldn't take much to look at it again and get raw working. Lucky also put in terrain generation using libnoise to create different types of terrains automatically. Example, Perlin Noise, etc. I personally think importing from other programs is a higher priority since changes are Terragen, L3DT and Freeworld have better algorithms for these type of things.

It has the ability to raise and lower terrain but on my machine it raises and lowers too quickly - that needs to be fixed. Someone should add the ability to flatten and smooth terrain as well.

And the biggest one - the ability to paint texture splatting textures onto the terrain. This needs work also, because it only supports 4 textures for the entire terrain. It should be updated to at least use 4 textures per page, and allow you to select the 4 textures from a list of available textures. I also need support for a lightmap texture which is generated externally.

I'd like to be able to import and export the alphas for the texture splatting textures, so they can be generated and edited in external programs such as L3DT and Freeworld.

The terrain raise/lower functionality, as well as the paint functionality is actually built into the PLM2, not the editor. The editor simply calls functions on the PLM2 saying "raise terrain at this position" and the PLM2 does it.

Undo/redo would be nice, even if it were just a single undo step.

Those are the editing features currently. Once the editor is ready I'll be submitting it into CVS where people can take a look at adding features. I'm not saying I'm adding those features above, but they will need to get added before the terrain editing is fully featured enough to be used well.

Clay

If someone starts a PLSM2 tutorial on the WIKI and wrote the parts he knows, leaving blank and question on other parts, I'll fill it.

If someone starts a PLSM2 tutorial on the WIKI and wrote the parts he knows, leaving blank and question on other parts, I'll fill it.

I'm definitely planning on needing your input...

I'll try to get started tonight, and if nothing else I should have a list of questions.

I've actually figured quite a lot out durring the past week, although I'm still not comfortable with those darn generation and usage config files. I basically stole the Alpes config file to get one of my own maps working. I do know enough to create a heightmap in photoshop though and modify an existing gen.cfg file to split it up for me and then modify another cfg file to display it.

Basically to generate a map in photoshop you create an image of the dimmensions of your liking, lets say 1024x1024. Then you create your map image. The difference clouds render filter does a good job of creating a heightmap for my purposes. Once you get the image the way you like it, convert it to grayscale in Image->Mode and then go back to Image->Mode and change it from a 8 bits per channel to 16 bits per channel. Then save the image as a RAW file and when the Raw Options window comes up, change the Byte Order to IBM PC.

If you use the Alpes cfg files as examples for your map, you should be able to create a cool looking map. Although I would still like a tutorial that would teach me how to make these cfg files from scratch and when I would want to use different features etc.

Hopefully this helps out.