NTB's Eroded Hills and Valleys

NOTE 08/30/2010:
In May I uploaded a 10 part series of Terraced Hills and Valley

NOTE 04/11/10:
I have the magic numbers relations between L3DT, YATT, and NWN2 in a spread sheet here:
00) HTML
01) Open Office

NOTE 02/12/10: 3 of these areas are used in Valley Passage by Magical Wisps.

20 heavily eroded and terraced 32x32 empty areas made with L3DT and imported with YATT waiting to be populated with creatures, placeables, triggers, grass, rocks, trees, etc., and texture blended. The maps are roughly half rolling area with 1-4 eroded and terraced hills. Nearly all the walkmeshs require little to no touching up. The area transitions work but need attention. The areas are not designed to fit together but are connected for convenience.

YATT imports your L3DT Height and Alpha maps into the toolset. The YATT website explains what pixel sizes your L3DT maps must be in order for YATT to succeed. You will have to resize your L3DT maps accordingly either on export from L3DT or in an image viewer/editor such as Irfanview(it's free last I checked).

When you resize your map, you will also have to translate the max and min altitude of the L3DT height map if you have not already accounted for this in L3DT via the horizontal scale in the Design Map dialog.

Otherwise, your map will be stretched or squashed when you import it into the toolset. It is possible you may like this effect.

You can find the max altitude in L3DT by right clicking and choosing Operations->Heightfield-->Change vert. scale. Note, I messed up and set the wrong min height on all these maps. The result is that for each map, half of it is below sea level.

The smaller the L3DT tile count, the faster L3DT operates, but the smaller the resolution. I find that this is not a problem as cluttered terrain is a pain to maneuver through, and with the right settings, L3DT will crumple and roll the terrain so the eye is not bored, and leave the terrain usable.

The Design Map is the first map that L3DT makes. It is a grid and rough layout for the whole project. You can control a number of parameters in each grid. You can place mountains, plateaus, and seas. Change climate, erosion, terracing, lake formation, peaks, ridges, rolling, height on a grid by grid basis by clicking on each grid or brushing them on. You can also make changes on the entire map as a whole.

In retrospect, I should have tweaked the Design Map before I released my maps. I could have placed some mountains, plateaus, or seas to highlight the no-walk areas better.