It sure looks like I have it figured out. The placement of the fields and strategic objects will take the most time, of course, but the mesh creation is pretty easy.
I decided to start with islands. I am using the plane object in TrueSpace and then quad dividing it to give me a mesh or patch object with which I can create varying elevations. The plus side to that is you know for a fact that any area you want to place a field or factory in is flat and level. I've been making field and factory areas larger then they need to be so I know I have plenty of space to work in.
So, okay, repeat that for several islands or various meshes. Then I take a plane and scale it beyond the perimeter of the map and set it at elevation 0 and it becomes the water.
Open Pov-Ray and render with the ground plane set for color 0 and the terrain mesh will have the universal colormap as follows:
pigment { gradient y
color_map {
[0 color rgb 0]
[1 color rgb 1] } }
Output should be set as +w512 +h512, if I read the help file properly. The rest should be done in the editor.
Did I miss anything?
