Terrain Editor: Clone Tool

[bustr]

Wish:

A clone tool for terrain topographical structures for example, all or parts of a mountain range.

1. - Selection of area visa square, round and freehand.
2. - Unlimited pasting of clones with the ability to reorient each clone 360 degrees like object rotation.
3. - The ability to save a copy of the clone to create a library of topographical features.

This tool might make it possible to have a team create a terrain using a heightmap knowing your topo features are select able from a library. Heightmap creation to lay down 500ft elevation outlines of land mass and define ocean is very simple.

After finishing a volcanic mountain range covering aprox 4000sq miles, it was obvious taking advantage of the new level of detail the AH3 terrain editor now affords will cause players to shy away from making terrains for the MA. If they can create one or two objects, then clone and modify the placements, it will cut down on the enormous amount of time investment involved creating an MA terrain.


4000sq miles and I have two more islands of this size to continue creating volcanic mountain ranges. And the island is only 85% finished. Most large islands in the Pacific are volcanic in origin. While many mountain ranges on continents are tectonic plate upthrusts.

[bustr]

Just reminded myself last night why this might be problematical for Hitech and I apologize for not thinking of it.

Problem:

You will create a topo feature that will look really good based on the polygon orientation of the back ground mesh. It will have many fine features that the mesh and the orientation allows. You can clone this feature say 5 times and rotate each clone slightly towards 90 degrees from the original. The polygon mesh will impose it's limitations and begin to shred the finer details until you reach the full 90 degree rotation, at which point the large central core will exist, the fine features may just be a field of various sized polygon triangles and polygon cutouts into the terrain.

Sorry Hitech for the bad idea. 

[bustr]

Here is why this is a not so good wish.

In this experiment with pulling 3 mile long ramps down from a 10,000ft tall cylinder to the 8 primary directions. Top of the picture is north, you can see the polygon mesh dictates the outcome even with a structure this massive. Then off each end of each ramp you can see this again with the tiny ramps I pulled. The terrain editor does not like me some days.......