Day 11 – Green everywhere!

After Day 10, I had figured out a little bit more about Terragen’s place in the grand scheme of scenery design, and had actually been able to apply Dave Regula’s Moriarty01.tgw schema to my Caesar Creek scenery.  Today’s task is to build a ‘World’ (TGW) schema more appropriate to flat Ohio farmland.  After messing around with some different surface layer arrangements, I came up with a very simple set of surfaces as shown in the following figures

Caesar Creek Scenery 'World' (TGW), with 'Flatland' surface specification shown

Caesar Creek Scenery ‘World’ (TGW), with ‘Flatland’ surface specification shown

Valley Sides Surface Specification

Valley Sides Surface Specification

River Valley Surface Specification

River Valley Surface Specification

 

I rendered a few tiles right around the airport using this arrangement and then viewed it in Condor.  While I’m pretty sure it won’t win any prizes for scenery design, it no longer looks like the Gobi desert either.  As a reminder, the way this was done is as follows:

  • Load a particular tile using the Landscape dialog’s ‘Open…’ button and selecting the tile to be used (i.e. 0302.ter)
  • Click the ‘Render’ button on the Render Control dialog to render the tile using the current coloring scheme
  • After the render operation completes, save the finished file back to C:\Program Files\Condor\Landscapes\CaesarCreek\Working\Terragen folder (the same folder contains both the input (.TER) and output (.BMP) files.
  • Launch Landscape Editor and open the Caesar Creek Scenery; this loads all the ‘texture files’ (BMPs) and displays them on the landscape grid.
  • Convert everything to DDS files using the ‘File\Export textures to DDS’ menu option.

Some tiles rendered using new coloring scheme

Some tiles rendered using new coloring scheme

 

After determining that the coloring scheme was suitable, then I used Hitzi’s TerragenForCondor.exe program to crunch through all the tiles in batch mode, while I took a well-earned break from my PC and read a book (Mongoliad, Book Two if anyone is interested).  After a half-hour or so, the script completed and (after re-exporting textures to DDS) I was able to fly the result in Condor, as shown below.

 

Note that all of today’s task (and several previous days) is essentially what is described in Task 5 – Generating textures with Terragen of the Condor Scenery Toolkit 1.0 document.  For my next trick, I think I’ll take a crack at Task 6 – Generating forest areas and Task 7 – Creating fields.  Assuming I survive all that, I may actually have a scenery that won’t completely suck ;-).

Frank (TA)

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