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Required Resources

Before any scenery design work can begin in TerraBuilder's SynthWizard, absolute minimum requirement is ownership of Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator. It contains the default, summer landscape texture sets necessary to design default CFS/FS2000 scenery. As CFS is getting old, it is possible to pick it up on the software store shelves at cut-rate prices (I purchased mine for $20). For obvious reasons, textures required by SynthWizard are NOT freely distributed, as they are under full Microsoft Copyright.

Also, anyone who is going to be using the scenery designed with SynthWizard must own a copy of Combat Flight Simulator, since the textures required for the scenery come from CFS CD.

Next, as you will be designing a landscape, you will need an altitude map. In TerraBuilder, altitude maps can be defined in a variety of ways, including BMP grayscale texture map, DTED Level 0 USGS elevation maps, and ASCII files with latitude/Longitude/Altitude triplets. Check the TerraBuilder's Web Site, resources section and TerraBuilder documentation (available for download from the web site) for more info on this.

For the purpose of this tutorial, a small BMP type grayscale bitmap will be used. 

 

 

Altitude Map

About its creation:

The altitude map used in this tutorial is called "tutorial6b.bmp". It is a 256-color (grayscale) windows bitmap. This format is also known as "8-bit indexed" bitmap. I made it in several minutes. The process was as follows:

  • Using Adobe Photoshop, Black and White colors set as foreground and background and its "Clouds" filter, I created the base "cloudy" shape

  • Then I used several iterations of "Cloud difference" filter for added detail.

  • Then, several "streaks" (what looks like root shapes in Figure 1) were added to simulate mountain erosion effect. I used an airbrush tool with white and black colors and "fade to transparent" option after 15 steps.

  • Finally, using the airbrush, I filled "flat" areas (uniform shades) where the lake, the town and the airfield will be positioned. Please note this step, this is very important.

The result is shown in the Figure 1 on the right. TerraBuilder will accept this image as a 3-dimensional landscape. It will "see" this altitude map as depicted in Figure 2. This plastic-looking 3-dimensional relief image in Figure 2 was produced by using Corel Photo Paint and a Bump Map filter, with the tutorial6b.bmp as a bump map. The sun is shining from the north (top), and the lowest portion of the terrain is in the lower left quadrant of the altitude map.

Looking at Figure 2, please note a deliberate flattening of several areas in the altitude map:

  • The lowest area, in the lower left portion of the altitude map, has been flattened and prepared to accept a body of water (a small lake).

  • On the opposite, lower right end of the image, there is another flattened area, and this area will be used to position an urban area (a small city).

  • Finally, above the urban area there is a third flattened area which we will use for a small grass runway (grass clearing).

These areas are clearly defined on the altitude map in Figure 3. Please take care to remember these positions when going through the steps later in the SynthWizard creation process. There is nothing wrong in positioning landscape features somewhere else on the altitude map, but then you're running a risk of having water running uphill, or having an urban area on a mountain top.

Size of the altitude map

The size of the altitude map has been deliberately set to 81x81 pixels. This way, the altitude map is exactly as large as TerraBuilder needs it to be. The reason is that, TerraBuilder will by default build scenery with chunks that have a grid density of 4. That means that if there will be 20x20 chunks, (as it will be in our scenery), with each chunk having 4 subdivisions, there will have to be 80 grid nodes. Finally, one node is added as an ending node, which gives a total of 81 x 81 nodes, precisely the size of our Altitude Map.

If you increase the grid density to 8, the ideal altitude map size would be 161X161. If it was set to 2, the altitude map size would have to be decreased to 41X41.

Please note that you do not have to have an ideal size of the altitude map for TerraBuilder to function properly. The ideal altitude map size will, however, yield the fastest compile time and it will ensure that there will be no altitude map gaps (known as "tenting") on the edges of the TexRelief chunks.

 

 

 

 


Figure 1: Altitude map for this tutorial


Figure 2: How TerraBuilder "sees" the altitude map


Figure 3: placement of the features