I just wanted to post a plug for Leveller 4.0 as a tool for making terrain/tracks. It lets you edit your terrain in 3D. It has several plugins and tools for creating terrain. Once you are done with your terrain you can export it to a 24 bit BMP file and preserve all your detail when you load it into Digital Earthworks.
For those that are using taller terrain you will quickly find out that the resolution of even 16 bit per channel images can be limiting. You end up with stair steps or rough terrain. If you get aggressive blurring then you start to ruin your nicely formed jumps, etc.
While it hasn't been updated version wise in a while. It does keep getting updated and you can get the latest build by contacting them. I had some problems importing 16 bit per channel RGB TIFFs and while I could convert them to Greyscale, Ray is fixing the problem. In the 9 years or so that I have owned Leveller I have only needed support about 3 times. Each time I have been contacted quickly with an answer or a work around.
I believe it is the best utility available for editing terrain and the price is an affordable $50.00.
http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/index.htm
Valley Ride in Leveller:
(http://dirttwister.com/images/vr_solid_480.jpg) (http://dirttwister.com/images/vr_solid.jpg)
(mcm2boys - just tweaked the link)
Also does a great job of importing a variety of real world height data formats. Buying Leveller was the best $50 I've ever spent! :)
I'm playing with creating a Leveller plugin that is letting me explore some different ways of starting a track. I wanted a way to find interesting terrain, explore it in Reflex, lay down a track path, and then grade that track path. The result would be a starting point for making a track.
I'm working through the pieces and parts of it now, but I figured I would post up an example of what I'm talking about.
The first step of my experiment was to create a displacement map using a cloud plugin in Paint Shop Pro. I believe the plugin is actually from an older verison of Photo Shop. I just kept generating clouds until I found one that I looked like it would be good terrain. I loaded it into Digital Earthworks, made the minimum track required to ride it. I explored it and then layed down a spline.
I wrote a utility that would read the spline file and generate input for my Leveller plugin. I haven't decided yet if I would make this all part of the Leveller plugin or not.
(http://twisteddirt.com/images/splinefile_480.jpg) (http://twisteddirt.com/images/splinefile.jpg)
I then load the displacement map into Leveller:
(http://twisteddirt.com/images/grader_example1a_480.jpg) (http://twisteddirt.com/images/grader_example1a.jpg)
After running the plugin which takes the spline data and runs an imaginary grader along the spline and some blurring to tidy it up, I end up with this:
(http://twisteddirt.com/images/grader_example2a_480.jpg) (http://twisteddirt.com/images/grader_example2a.jpg)
A slightly different view:
(http://twisteddirt.com/images/grader_example3a_480.jpg) (http://twisteddirt.com/images/grader_example3a.jpg)
Here is a video of riding this track after running the Grader Leveller plugin. It seems to me like a promising way to start a track. For some reason with SMF 2.0.8 I am unable to embed this video.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5acAzcPCA
Looking good Bruce, i like that it's a more natural way to make a track layout in a natural terrain, that's how i started with Pleasant farm.. :)