Heightmap based alpha map

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1

hello folks,



in order to make my randomly generated test-terrains look a little bit nicer, i wrote a little alpha map generator that creates alpha maps based on the height of the terrain. That way beaches were sandy and mountains were rocky now in my terrain :smiley:



I wondered that there is nothing like this in jme included, so i decided to put this up on GitHub so everyone can use it, if yu want to.

Source code is there:

https://gist.github.com/1759372



It lacks a little documentation, but i will update javadoc as i get the time. but i should be self-explanatory.





here are some example pictures from my last generated terrain:







the generated alpha map:







Of course it’s not perfect. the changes could be smoother etc.pp. but i think its a good starting point.

5 Likes
2

Cool, this could easily be made a right-click item for terrain in the SceneComposer, any interest in doing that?

https://wiki.jmonkeyengine.org/legacy/doku.php/sdk:development:sceneexplorer#adding_items_to_the_add_and_tools_menus

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Glad you like it :smiley:



I must honestly say, i have NO experience what so ever with writing plugins for netbeans (i’m myself more of a eclipse user, using netbeans only for the scene composer right now). Anyway, if you think thats a good feature for jMP, i will give it a try.



I’m currently thinking about adding support for more than three heights - TerrainLighting.j3md supports up to three alpha maps, so i could make it generate more then one map. So maybe i will update this a little bit at first and then add it to the scene composer :wink:

4

Alright, cool. Its all very easy, everything you need to do to prepare development and start a plugin is laid out in the wiki really. The class I posted in the previous post is all you need to implement in addition to your own classes.

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Looks nice. It would definitely be cool to have as a plugin to the SDK.

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I have made some advancements to the code, you can check it out at github (link in the first post).



I do not longer use a BufferedImage and convert this to a jME3 Image later, but write directly to a ByteBuffer from which the image is constructed in the end.



Anyway, i have also changes the saving method, so the image can still be easily exported to a .png file.



I hope these changes will allow me to blend the areas together more smoothly in the future (i will definitely work on that).