Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: Saxman on September 08, 2009, 11:37:26 AM
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Just a thought, but would it be possible to have a "soft" edge on the draw/erase water brush? While I've found manually editing the waterd.bmp very useful, after playing with it a bit there's still times where editing water within the editor allows for more fine tuning. The problem is the brush doesn't provide a smooth transition in water depth which makes it very difficult to blend the depth and provide smooth transitions.
This could also be applied to the Ocean/River brush as well to held smooth the transition between ocean and river color.
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I think you can do it if you are painting terrains. Basically choose the blend terrain check box. Then pick the land equivalent of water tiles.
If you are just using the colors in the water tab, no real idea on how to smooth it out.
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GD,
I'm talking about the water depth. AFAIK, blending water and beach only affects the look of the terrain, not the depth of the water over it.
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Actually I found that you can blend different wntt files also this way. So beach is ntt1010 for land use but if you have wntt1010 for water use and blend it with wntt1012 (ntt1012 snow and coral) it does paint and a blend over areas that have water depth.
The interface is just a little clunky when doing a blend over water tiles over water that has depth since it lists the tiles per their land names.
But you are correct that blending water tiles only works when water depth already exists in that area.
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GD,
I'm not talking about the terrain tiles. I'm talking about the actual water depth ITSELF. The "Paint Water" brush doesn't have a smooth blend. If I were to use the erase water tool it goes from dry land to Challenger Deep with no transition whatsoever.
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Saxman, I understand that and in my first response to you.
I think you can do it if you are painting terrains.
If you are just using the colors in the water tab, no real idea on how to smooth it out.
However, after review I can see that my meaning might not come across clearly in my responses.
You are correct you can't achieve a nice transition just by using the water color brush.
You can achieve a nice anti-aliased water depth transition affect via the use of water terrain tiles. Its a work around basically.
You can set up multiple water tiles to simulate the colors of each water depth area you want and then paint them over water that has depth to achieve a very smooth affect. So if you want a smoother transition I am saying I have achieved good results with creating multiple wntt files, then create an area of depth that fades out via the waterd.bmp file, then paint a zone, then blend a zone between it and the next zone, and so on. It creates a nice transitional affect. That is the only way I have found so far to achieve what you want since painting the straight water color leaves much harder aliased edges.
If you don't use water tiles but just the straight water color brush as you stated the edges are much rougher and I have yet to discover anyway around it.
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As for the actual depth of the water, right now the only point I see to it in the editor is the ability to:
1) Either paint that water color area with the water color brush
or
2) the ability to paint water terrain tiles over areas with depth
Outside of that water depth doesn't seem to have any effect or purpose other than cosmetic as far as I can tell.
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The cosmetic effect is PRECISELY what I mean. It'd be nice if the Erase/Paint Water brush could more easily blend depth by giving the brush a "soft" edge, making for a smoother transition between the shallows and deep water. It's easily achieved with a paint program by manually editing the waterd.bmp, but this would be helpful for fine-tuning water depth in the editor without being left with abrupt changes in depth.
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Agreed it would.
Just until they ad that into the editor only way you can do it is by using water tiles and blending those and taking the file size increase hit of your final build since you are adding in additional custom terrain tiles.