Terrain Colors/Texture
Editor
GenesisII generates realistic surface textures and colors using fractalization
techniques.
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Fractalization
This set of parameters control the basic fractalization of the landscape.
- Depth: Fractalization level applied. Increasing this parameter increases
the surface detail but also increases rendering times. A fractal depth of
1 or 2 is usually sufficient to explore a landscape, with a setting of 3 or
greater being used for final images. The Fractal Depth parameter may also
be set directly from the renderer window's toolbar.
- Edge fuzzyness: Controls the fuzzyness of the tree line and snow
line boundaries, plus graduation within these.
- Seed values: Set of four seed values controlling fractalization.
Each set of four values gives a unique, reproducable, surface.
- Snow Line: Position of snow line as a percentage of minimum to maximum
height value.
- Tree Line: Position of tree line as a percentage of minimum to maximum
height value.
- Bias: Biases color distribution for a surface between it's two defined
colors. Usually left at 50%.
- Seed Values: Used by GenesisII for fractalization. Changing these
will subtly affect surface color and texture distribution.
Standard Surfaces
Unless Terrains are used, GenesisII renders
the landscape surface using colors and textures controlled by these parameters.
GenesisII uses the concept of a surface to define how different areas of the
landscape will be rendered. Areas on the landscape are assigned as belonging
to different surfaces on the basis of altitude, slope parameters and the structure
of the surface tree. Surfaces differ from terrains in that it is not possible
to explicitly assign a particular area of the landscape to a particular surface,
rather the assignment is made by GenesisII on the basis of the surface information
provided.
The tree list box on the left of the section shows the surface tree. Landscapes
always have a minimum of three surfaces - Below Treeline, Intermediate,
and Above Snowline. New child surfaces can be assigned to any of these
primary surfaces using the new button. These can be split further if necessary.
All surfaces can be renamed using the edit box above the surface color controls.
All surfaces require two colors to be assigned. GenesisII will apply these
two colors to the surface by considering local conditions and the Bias setting.
If a single color is required simply set both color controls to the same value.
Texture Parameter
The following parameters affect the surface texture.
- Roughness: Large surface roughness. This setting effects the physical
roughness of the surface - i.e. the polygon vertexes comprising the surface
are displaced.
- Bumpiness: Small scal roughness. This parameter effects the surface
texture mapping only - i.e. the actual shape of the surface is not changed.
- Shininess: Shininess of the surface. The degree to which light is
reflected.
- Specularity: Highlight reflections. How gloss or matt the surface
appears
- Emission: Emission characteristics. The degree to which the surface
appears to emit light. Only used for special effects
Distribution Parameters
These parameters contol the distribution of the texture on the landscape surface.
- Coverage weighting: A weighting value for this surface. Weighting
for all surfaces of the same parent surface at the same level are added and
the relative weighting for each surface calculated as a proportion of this.
Child surfaces inherit the parents proportions.
- Altitude control: The altitude that the surface will appear at. Minimum
and maximum altitudes can be specified and the fuzzyness of the bands edge.
- Slope Control: Similar to altitude, this set of controls determine
the preferred slope range for a surface.