Hello everybody,

This time I will tell you how you can import your own heightmap into V3d.

You will need the following things first:

• A heightmap
• A texture
• Your terrain's dimensions
• A scene J

First start with opening your scene. Then, open Architect and switch to terrain tab there. In the toolbar click the button "Create New". Now select "From Textures". A dialog should appear. Now you need to specify your terrains properties. Base texture means the texture that will be displayed on very far away pieces of your terrain. Usually you can create a Bird's Eye View in your terrain generation software, that would be your base texture. Now you will probably wonder what will be used as your terrain's texture for the nearer pieces. It is something that is called Splatting, basically it is a composition of four materials. Those materials contain two textures, one for farer distance and one for nearer distance, so that an additional level of detail is created. So you can basically say that terrain texture knows three different textures based on the view. In the list below I start with the one that is the most far away:

1. Base Texture
2. Far Splatting
3. Near Splatting

It is not too much of a problem if you do not understand everything right now; there will be another tutorial about hand-painting your terrain with splatting someday.
After you selected a texture, now select a heightmap for your terrain.

We highly recommend keeping your heightmap size at maximum 2048*2048 pixels, because otherwise the processing may take really long. The heightmap size has nothing to do with the size of the final terrain though. I create a 10240*10240*500 terrain out of a 2048*2048 heightmap. When scaling the terrain up like in my case, of course you lose some detail but in my case it was worth the time-win. 2048*2048 for a heightmap size should be enough for most needs, but if you are unsure, just try yourself.

Then specify your terrain size in meters in the boxes below. Also specify the heightrange (e.g. 0-500 meters) of your terrain.

Click ok. The preview will be generated. You can change your terrain in Preview mode if you want, just take a look at the panel on right, for the purpose of this tutorial, I will leave it as it is.

Now click build/apply to finally make your terrain be ready for your game world.

That process takes some time. After it has been done, you can go back to scene view and look at your nice new terrain.

That is how terrains from textures are being build.

It is pretty easy actually, so this tutorial was pretty short, I hope I said everything about the things that were unclear, if not any feedback is wanted below.

-Chris