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Planet surface generation

AnorilAAnoril
edited October 2011 in AstroSynthesis General
Hello!

I'm very interrested in the surface generation. I own "Fractal Terrain" which has been customised with Terraformer plugin providing realistic looking generated surface map.

I would like to know if AS3 supports custom surface generator, like AS2 does? And if it is possible/coming feature to pass parameters to custom generator?

The best of would be that FT is already taken into account and fully supported, but I may dream a bit ;)

Looking forward for your kind answer.

Regards,

Anne

Comments

  • Ed_NBOSEd_NBOS
    Yes, FT is supported in AS3 the way it was in AS2. Actually, the integration is a little better because AS will now automatically call FT when a surface map is needed - you dont have to manually tell AS to launch it. PF even sent us a beta of their latest version over the summer to test with.
  • AnorilAAnoril
    Thanks a lot for your reply!
  • AdamQuarkAAdamQuark
    The only problem with using FT over the native surface generator is that FT's coloring is more informative than naturalistic. I've used Terraformer to create some nice systems, but that is a manual process, as far as I know. So, I went back to AS's native generator.

    If you've found some way to have Terraformer run automatically, that process'd be nice to know.

    Thing about the native generator, though, is that it seems to have a limited algorithm for generating the topology. I see a lot of surfaces with a big ol' crater that, after a while, looks awfully familiar.
  • MGCJerryMMGCJerry
    Yes, thats one of the main reasons why I quit using the AS generator and stick to using FT because of the variation and you dont see that same crater. I'd also love to find a way to get use AS to use FT and terraformer to auto-create the previews as it would save me a ton of time over the next 300 or objects. An automated way would also be nice if there was a way to set a default shader in FT Perhaps this should also be discussed with Profantasy...? Anyway, here is my current workflow.

    1. Create systems in AS3
    2. Use FT2 in AS3 settings to create surface maps (FT3 still crashes)
    3. "Edit surface map" to bring up FT. Create cloud layers and tweak the maps from the terraformer resources.
    4. Export spherical map from FT.
    5. If this planet will be mapped later on or it is important i will save the FT file, else i can always get the planet back later from AS.
    6. Go back to AS3 and set my FT exported map as my terrain map.

    Rinse and repeat for every planet.

    94_1318043737.gif 95_1318127580.gif

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