Daylon Leveller: Can I Smooth tracks in DE?

[C4Detonator]

Ive made several tracks with photoshop and have used the displacement map to smooth them out, but i just found out about Daylon Levellr to make really cool elevation tracks. I want the mountain track to be fairly tall, so in DE i set the scale settings to ~10-5 to be very tall. With that happening, the terrain is far too bumpy to just upload, so i try to smooth it in two ways, but neither are working: 1. Gaussian blur in photoshop cancels out the jumps and berms far too much. 2. Displacement map takes in the Leveller BMP (which is all blue and red looking)
and cant comprehend what is happening so it spits out a flat map full of spikes instead of a  smooth mountain.

Any suggestions to how i can smooth out my track would be greatly appreciated.

[JamieT]

2. Displacement map takes in the Leveller BMP (which is all blue and red looking)
and cant comprehend what is happening so it spits out a flat map full of spikes instead of a  smooth mountain.

Sorry I don't quite understand what you're saying here.

View Disp Map http://twisteddirt.com/smf/index.php?topic=3003.0  is what you're talking about right?

This tool lets you import your track you created in Photoshop and smooths out those stair steps.  The reason you get stair steps is because Photoshop only allows you to create heightmaps with 8bits of data.  This means you only have 256 levels of elevation.

The solution is to use the ViewDisp tool to smooth the terrain, or to use Leveller.  Once you have the multi-coloured output from either of those tools, you can't go back into photoshop to do any editing because it ruins the data.  What's happening is that they create heightmaps with 16bits of data, which is spread accross the red and green channels.

[mcm2boys]

The answer to 'Can I Smooth tracks in DE?' is no DE doesn't do any smoothing.

But i would suggest that when you import a disp map from leveller,

1) make your disp map exactly the height you want it when you model it in leveller and use 1 unit = 1 foot (i think Jamie can probably confirm the unit values)

2) When you import it into DE, use a scaling factor of 1 so in DE you get exactly what you had in Leveller.

[C4Detonator]

So when i go to save Daylon Leveller as a Bmp file, the outcome is a very small (150x150 pixel) picture which is differentiated by two colors depicting its height: blue - low, red - high.

Since the bmp file makes itself 150x150, i open up photoshop and enlargen the bmp to fit the dimensions 1024x1024. I transfer the file to DE now and set the scaling to 5.00 to keep it very tall, however, the elevation bumps are far too severe to ride on, so it has to be smooothened. I take the 1024x1024 bmp file of my track and put it into the Displacement Map. Because it was a blue and red file, the displacement map looks at the file and reads it incorrectly - making the track completely flat with huge spikes.

So, instead of using the displacement map, i try going back in to photoshop and blurring the Bmp file. Alas this gets ride of some elevation bumps but pretty much blurs too much of the track to where it is too different than the original track.

Is there a way I could take the original blue and red Bmp file and smoothen out the elevation bumps without distorting the track? (Thank you for your replys)

[mcm2boys]

I haven't used Leveller in a long time, so i can't give advice as to why you're only getting a bitmap 150x150, if your height map is 1024x1024 that should be the size of the output BMP.

Like Jamie said this is an image where the height is spread over 2 color channels, so anything you do in Photoshop is going to mangle those heights, since PS smooths each channel separately not as a single 16bit value, and nothing is going to fix that, DE or the map smoothing util.

The only way to go is export as 1024x1024 (or 2048x2048 for Nationals).

[Fixer]

I remember 'trial' versions being size limited but the full version exports at the size you enter,
you can't rescale it in photoshop- well you can but it doesn't do what you hoped for...

[C4Detonator]

Thank you guys alot for helping me with it, i do have the trial, but maybe ill just stick to photoshop or something. Anyways thanks guys

[TwizardT]

you can maybe try to make the blue and red heightmap to black and white by turning it to greyscale (image -> mode -> greyscale)

[Fixer]

you really can't convert a leveller height map image to grey scale, and if you could it would remove the best reason to use leveller.

It's actually green & red...

[LOGANYZ125]

Hey Fixer actual i tried to yesterday and you can when u got file>export>instead of making it a .bmp make it a .png and it shows up and you can edit it in PS or what have you. 

[Fixer]

I know you can edit it but what happens when you import it? If you reduce it to grey scale you lose all the advantages of Leveller
being able to make max elevation values that aren't stair stepped.

I have made minor corrections to the 16 bit images - in PS to create larger flat areas, etc but the places where the terrain varies it's impossible to smoothly edit the 16 bit image.

[LOGANYZ125]

whenyou're done editing in PS you import it back into Leveller then export it again and then theres no stair steps

[Fixer]

um, OK.... I'm not seeing the point of doing that?

[DirtTwister]

I always see it as a one way trip.  I might use Leveller only for smoothing at first, which would allow me to continue editing in a PS or PSP.  Once I start editing in Leveller then I never go back to PS/PSP.

I never round trip it.