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Command Reference

SynthWizard Step 3

Specifying the landscape classes participating in the scenery

In SynthWizard step 3, a list of all loaded landscape classes is displayed, with blank check boxes next to the class names. Here, SynthWizard needs to be told which landscape groups will participate in the scenery being built. When one or more landscape classes are selected, SynthWizard will use only and only the selected landscape classes to build the scenery. It will randomly pick and choose from the selected classes and match the adjoining chunks by again randomly selecting from the selected classes textures that only fit seamlessly to its neighbors.

For instance,

  • If you select WATER class only, you will end up with a uniform water cover. There will be no other landscape classes.
  • If you select WATER and WOODS, you will end up with a water surface covered with patches of wooded islands
  • If you select WATER, WOODS and URBAN, you will end up with a water surface covered with islands combined with urban development and wooded areas
  • If you select WOODS only, you will end up with the terrain covered with trees and shrubbery, and the coverage will vary randomly, based on the several different WOODS class textures which are versions of the pure WOODS texture (all edges mated to the same WOODS class)

and so on...

It is strongly recommended that, when building the scenery with SynthWizard, only the general landscape class be selected. Specific landscape classes, such as urban development, should be omitted because cities and towns have specific locations, and if they are selected to participate in the landscape generation as outlined above, SynthWizard will randomly place them in the scenery.

Even though you may have many or all of the texture groups loaded (this is controlled in the TerraBuilder Properties dialog), you may not wish to use some of them in the initial terrain generation. For instance, you may want to define urban development (cities, villages) at specific places in your scenery, and therefore exclude them in the initial terrain generation. To accomplish that, place check marks only for the terrain types you wish to participate in the SynthWizard terrain generation. Do not check the unwanted types (in the above example, do NOT check terrain type containing urban development textures). You can easily insert other loaded terrain types later in the scenery development.

Specifying whether any water surfaces should be frozen in the winter

This option becomes active only when one of the landscape classes selected is WATER. When this option is selected, all of the chunks containing water surface will have their "Frozen in Winter" property set to TRUE. This means that, when flying in the winter mode (and if the scenery was built with winter mode activated), all water surfaces will be covered with ice. This property can be easily de-activated (which means all water surface will be water in winter mode) by using chunk properties dialog.