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EarthScultor is a tool for designing and painting heightmaps, useful in art projects, geographic
visualization and game development. Earthsculptor allows you to start from scratch, or work
from an existing heightmap and saves heightmaps as a 16-bit png image. Earthsculptor works
well with other paint programs to edit your heightmaps and textures, and can be used simply as
a visualization tool.
CAMERA CONTROLS
mouse
keyboard
TOOL CONTROLS
mouse
keyboard
space bar - when terraforming switches to a vertex point tool to modify vertices
shift + left mouse button - up/down mouse movement changes tool radius
tab - switch to previously used terrain tool/detail texture
caps lock - hides/unhides UI windows
control + z - undo
control + shift + z - redo
Page up/ Page down - switch to a predetermined view
Home - goes to home position
1 - toggle LOD
2 - toggle Wireframe
3 - toggle Grid
4 - toggle Color Map
5 - toggle Detail Map
6 - toggle Light Map
USER INTERFACE
EarthSculptor works by selecting various tools to work with from the tool bar control. The large property bar
will change according to the tool selected. When adjusting tool variables you can click the edit box and
raise the numerical value by holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse up and down to change
the value.
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EarthSculptor
THE MENU
File
Utility
Screenshot - dumps a screenshot of the current scene into the screenshot directory of Earthsculptor
Reload Textures - reloads all textures, useful if your using an external paint program to edit them and
preview your results in Earthsculptor
Reload HeightMap - reloads the heightmap, useful if your using an external paint program to edit the
heightmap and Earthsculptor to preview your changes
Smooth Textures - turn off to disable texture smoothing, usefully for precise painting of the color or detail
map and to show the actual pixels of the various texture maps.
Import
Heightmap Image- import png, tga, bmp image and scales to current map size
Export
Obj Export - exports the terrain to the common 3D .obj format, you have the option of exporting an
optimized mesh or a dense mesh
Terrain Textures - exports any combination of color/detail/lighting texture map of any size
Generate
Detail height - automatically paints the map with 4 detail heights at the set heights
Perlin noise - generates or blends into the existing terrain a new terrain using the perlin noise algorithm
Camera
Undo/Redo
allows you to go through a list of undo/redo operations that you made on your map
Help
PAINTING TEXTURES
Earthsculptor offers two combined options for painting textures, you paint directly onto a color map using
the paint tool and the material picker/palette or you can paint repeating detail textures (up to 4) using
the detail texture tool . The colormap and detail textures are combined together using the selected
method in the terrain panel of either, add, add minus half or multiply. The terrain panel also allows you
to switch off the paint,detail and lighting textures.
Material Picker
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EarthSculptor
Palette
Selecting colors and textures in Earthsculptor is quick and offers a real time response to your changes.
The palette and material picker is used to change color/texture with the paint tool and for changing
texture/color for things such as water color, fog color, background, ect... You can either pick from the
palette or make on the fly changes with the material picker.
To modify a palette item, first select the palette item, adjust the material in the material picker and click 'set
palette' in the palette to make the change.
THE TOOLBAR
The EarthSculptor toolbar selects different tools and properties of your scene to work on. The property
panel will change according to the tool selected.
Terrain
The terrain parameters in general, turn on/off LOD, fog, change height, underground texture, background
and skyboxes
LOD - sets the Level of Detail of the terrain, making the terrain
appear less/more detailed but improving the applications
performance
Color Mode - sets how the the detail and color maps interact
with each other: add, add minus half or multiplying color
values.
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EarthSculptor
skybox
Terraform
8 tools to change the terrain: raise, lower, level, grab, smooth, erode, push and ramp. Use the left mouse
button to apply the tool.
Hold shift and move the mouse to change the radius of the tool while your cursor is on the map.
Hold cntrl key while using raise or lower to reverse the action, using while level constrains the height of the
level
Terraforming automatically updates the lighting and shadows (if enabled), applying the tool to larger parts
of the map will effect the response of recalculating the lighting
The tools are pretty self explanatory, play with them to find
out what they all do.
Detail
Hold shift and move the mouse to change the radius of the tool while your cursor is on the map.
With the current detail texture selected you can set a new
detail texture and change the parameters
Paint
Paint color and texture to the color map using the material palette and picker
Hold shift and move the mouse to change the radius of the tool while your cursor is on the map.
Hold the control key and the cursor will change to an eyedropper which can be used to set the current
color to selected pixel color off of the color map.
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EarthSculptor
You can store and use 6 materials to the color panel and adjust
the parameters of each one individually
Slope forces your detail brush to only draw on parts of the map
with a certain slope, you can toggle multiple slope angles to
increase the range
Lighting
Adjust lighting and shadows, generate new lightmaps for the map
When this tool is enabled, an arrow appears in the center of the screen. Holding the left mouse button and
moving the mouse adjusts the light direction. Regenerating the lightmap or terraforming the terrain will
change the lightmap.
Water
Enable/disable water and change it's height, scale, distortion and color
You can further modify the way the distortion and water
looks by changing the uvdv and normal map textures,
they are found in data/textures of your earthsculptor
directory. You can use Nvidia texture tools with
photoshop to create new ones.
To create a new map go to the menu file->new, you will be presented with the new map panel where you
can select the size of the terrain and size of the color detail and lighting texture maps.
Texture splitting splits all the texture maps into 4 or 16 separate smaller sized textures by splitting the
texturemap once(1) or twice(2) respectively, this improves performance painting the maps on large maps as
only the affected textures needs to be updated.
Detail textures allows you to set the number of detail textures you can use in the terrain, 4 or 8
RGB lighting allows you to use RGB color to define the lighting of the lightmap alternatively to just
grayscale lighting.
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EarthSculptor
MAP FORMAT
mapName.map - this is an ascii file containing all the parameters, colors, texture names used in the map
mapName.png - this is a 16-bit grayscale png representing the height values of the map
mapName_d.png - this is the detailmap texture of the map, each channel represents one of the four detail
textures that make up the detail textures.
mapName_dd.png - this is the second detailmap texture of the map if your map is supporting 8 detail
textures, each channel represents one of the four detail textures that make up the last 4 detail textures.
Working with external tools to change your terrain and color texture map
You can work with the terrain and color map in an external editor while you work in EarthSculptor. Open or
create a new map, go to menu utility->explore, open the mapName.png and/or mapName_c.png in your
favorite image editor, modify the map or colormap and save it in your image editor, in EarthSculptor go to
menu utility->reload height map and/or utility->reload texture map. You can re-light the map and work
between applications to create your terrain. This is also a quick method of importing heightmaps,
geographic images and overlays into EarthSculptor from external sources.
All old maps will have to reset their ambient and light values in lighting and recalculate, since
EarthSculptor switched to RGB color support for lightmaps (note that it still works with grayscale lightmaps
as default).
LightMap
To change lightmap RGB/Grayscale, simply open the lightmap .png in an image program and set the
image to grayscale or RGB.
DetailMap
To have 8 detail textures, just create or remove an additional detailmap with the format detailmap_dd.png
(it has two 'd's)
Texture Splitting
This is hard to do. You have to modify the .map file to have 1 or 2 divisions (default is 0), and split the tile
texture manually for each lightmap, detailmap and colormap into (4 or 16 separate files) of the current size
divided by 2 or 4 (1 and 2 divisions respectively)
Note that to simply change the content of any of the light/color/detail maps or any of the textures, you can
always re-load them in the program from the utility menu. This makes for effective use of other image
applications to modify your heightmap
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