A few months ago, I became loosely involved into a discussion of how to get external Terrains into GG. Well, looking into that, the first Thing I found out was that GGs heightmaps are very straightforward and thus not to complicated to handle.

Here are some results from imported 3DSmax landscapes (supplied courtesy of Pirate Myke).


The "Minecraft" look is more or less a by-product, but nevertheless interesting.
If you carefully compare snapshot 5 and 7,you might notice something interesting.

Snapshot 2 is from another landscape, I thought with all that talk of real water on Mars in certain places, this is a view most becoming. It is derived from a mountainous landscape with some mathematics applied.

Let me know what you think about it.

Just noticed that the pictures' original names don't seem to show.
Snapshot5 is the second , snapshot 7 is the third from the left

snapshot 5 & 7 are the same but with altered water height (although i know that's not technically true, it's the outcome)?
what do they look like if you run the blend tool over the map? is it enough to remove the blocky-ness and make it look more natural?
nice work though

Hi, smallg. Thanks for your feedback

About the water height : Well spotted, smallg . Since the waterheight seems to be a fixed value in GG, the overall terrain level height was altered, giving off the same effect as if the water Level had been altered.

About the blocky landscape:
First of all - like I said - it's shown here deliberately in its somewhat atrocious shape.
Yes, The blockiness may be removed using the blend tool, and all other GG Editor Tools likewise may still be applied,
but there are better ways,..

Second: this blocky landscape deliberately disregarded the triangles 3dsmax supplies with the heightmap data,
to actually achieve the "Minecraft" look. So, using the triangles will make the landscape look way more natural.

Third : I have my own Tools to achieve "de-blocking" in other ways for the whole map in one go (but why would one choose the blocky option in the first place ?. These Tools may also be applied to non-blocky landscape, as the Mars landscape shows, although that was not composed of blocks, unlike the other one..

Very cool stuff here

interesting stuff, I have to look into this when I get more time. good job!

Thanks, guys.
Import of 3DSMax Heightmaps took me off my tracks a bit; I was actually after totally different Things, but - on the other hand - the 3DSMax Format looked like the effort was worth it.
But what I'm really working on is more evolved heightmap Manipulation like
* raising / lowering the whole map by an arbitrary value (already visible above)
* precipitating the whole map from any border (already available)
* rotating the whole map in 90° steps (already available)
* mirroring vertically, horizontally and against each of both diagonals (already available)
* raising / lowering regularly (squares, rectangles, circles) (already available) or irregularly shaped Areas
* path design by waypoint splining, moulding with selectable form profiles, optionally with several lanes
* Surface noise, to get rid off those boring rounded hills created by GG's Editor
* "portable holes", i.e. moving arbitrarily shaped parts of the landscape around
* fine-tunable Interpolation for large Areas (like the martian landscape above) (already available)
* chirurgical Tools (cutting out single or multiple adjacent full rows or columns of height Points, in order to eek out some space without having to redo everything left or right of the incision line)
* and more ...


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