10 replies to this topic

[Frank Skilton]

Hi,

Was wondering if anyone would be kind enough to lead me to a free terrain generator that allows you to build and manipulate terrain within a 3D editor, texture it, export a heightmap, and finally export the texture image.

I've tried:

- T.ED
- TerraEd
- Panorama

While T.ED and TerraEd are quite good for my needs (written specifically for DarkBasic & Blitz3D) they cost money thus I only have trial versions and cannot save / export.

I came across one years ago, think it was called Geoscape but can't quite remember. This allowed you to do everything I describe above, and although it was a trial version still gave you some saving / exporting options. Unfortunately I haven't been able to track it down.

So if anyone knows of any decent free terrain software please let me know.

P.S.

I'm not a tight arse, the engine i'm using hasn't got full terrain support as yet but it's coming, therefore I don't want to waste money on software that I will only be using for a short amount of time.

Thanks

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Google l3td. Its free and has a very nice feature set:yes:

[Reedbeta]

Try Terragen also. It is not free but has an evaluation version that allows loading/saving with a restriction on the size of the terrain (1024x1024 I think).

[Frank Skilton]

Thanks guys,

I have Terragen, use it for skyboxes. Terragen doesn't let you export the texture file (unless there's a plugin for it I don't know about).

[Reedbeta]

You can effectively export the texture by rendering an orthographic view from above the terrain. There's a button to do this somewhere in the camera settings. You also need to turn off atmospheric effects and possibly set the sun angle to straight up (unless you want shadows baked into the texture). I've done this to create landscape textures many times.

[quark]

http://nemesis.thewa...t/index.php?p=9

[Rofar]

PnP Terrain Creator
I think there is a free\community version.

[Frank Skilton]

Excellent, thanks guys. My terrain woes are over.

[Methulah]

That tool is mighty, mighty cool. Thanks for that, I might use that heavily in the future.

[Frank Skilton]

Geoscape 3D, sorry if I forgot to mention it.

[Dean Avanti]

here is a thread that may help with exporting textures from terragen, tut is used in the unreal engine but can be used in other engines.
hope it helps.

http://forums.beyond...ad.php?t=173046