Reference Guide
Camera Controls
mouse
mouse right mouse button controls camera orientation
mouse scroll wheel controls camera zoom
alt + left mouse button - rotate around cursor point
alt + middle mouse button - pan
alt + right mouse button - zoom
keyboard
default movement controls (can be changed in menu->camera->keyboard
controls)
move forward/back/left/right e/d/s/f
up/down a/z
numeric key pad (numlock on)
forward/back/left/right 8/2/4/6
camera roll left/right 7/9
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TOOL CONTROLS
mouse
left mouse button - terraform and paint color/detail
keyboard
space bar - when terraforming switches to a vertex point tool to modify
vertices
shift + left mouse button - up/down mouse movement changes tool radius
tab - switch to previously used terrain tool/detail texture
caps lock - hides/unhides UI windows
control + z - undo
control + shift + z - redo
Page up/ Page down - switch to a predetermined view
Home - goes to home position
control - special function key:
terraform: reverses raise/lower terraform, forces uniform height when
using level terraform
color: color picker - sets the current working color from the colormap
at the cursors position
1 - toggle LOD
2 - toggle Wireframe
3 - toggle Grid
4 - toggle Color Map
5 - toggle Detail Map
6 - toggle Light Map
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USER INTERFACE
EarthSculptor works by selecting various tools to work
with from the tool bar control. The large property bar will change according
to the tool selected. When adjusting tool variables you can click the
edit box and raise the numerical value by holding the left mouse button
and moving the mouse up and down to change the value.
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THE MENU
File
New - create a new map
Load - load a map
Save/Save As. - save map
Utility
Show stats - show frame rate and poly count
Screenshot - dumps a screenshot of the current scene into
the screenshot directory of Earthsculptor
Reload Textures - reloads all textures, useful if your
using an external paint program to edit them and preview your results
in Earthsculptor
Reload HeightMap - reloads the heightmap, useful if your
using an external paint program to edit the heightmap and Earthsculptor
to preview your changes
Smooth Textures - turn off to disable texture smoothing,
usefully for precise painting of the color or detail map and to show
the actual pixels of the various texture maps.
Import
Heightmap Image- import png, tga, bmp image and scales
to current map size
Export
Heightmap - exports png and tga heightmap of the current
terrain
Obj Export - exports the terrain to the common 3D .obj
format, you have the option of exporting an optimized mesh or a dense
mesh
Terrain Textures - exports any combination of color/detail/lighting
texture map of any size
Generate
Detail height - automatically paints the map with 4 detail
heights at the set heights
Perlin noise - generates or blends into the existing terrain
a new terrain using the perlin noise algorithm
Camera
Camera Speed - slow, normal, fast camera speed
WASD keys - sets the camera controls to W/A/S/D for up,left,down,right
Set keys - sets the camera controls
Undo/Redo
allows you to go through a list of undo/redo operations
that you made on your map
Help
Access to this manual and information
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PAINTING TEXTURES
Earthsculptor offers two combined options for painting
textures, you paint directly onto a color map using the paint tool  and
the material picker/palette or you can paint repeating detail textures
(up to 4) using the detail texture tool  .
The colormap and detail textures are combined together using the selected
method in the terrain panel  of either, add, add minus half or multiply. The terrain panel also allows
you to switch off the paint,detail and lighting textures.
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MATERIAL AND COLOR PICKER
Material Picker
Palette
Selecting colors and textures in Earthsculptor is quick
and offers a real time response to your changes. The palette and material
picker is used to change color/texture with the paint tool and
for changing texture/color for things such as water color, fog color,
background, ect... You can either pick from the palette or make on the
fly changes with the material picker.
To modify a palette item, first select the palette item,
adjust the material in the material picker and click 'set palette' in
the palette to make the change.
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THE TOOLBAR
The EarthSculptor toolbar selects different tools and
properties of your scene to work on. The property panel will change
according to the tool selected.
Terrain
The terrain parameters in general, turn on/off LOD, fog,
change height, underground texture, background and skyboxes
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LOD - sets the Level of Detail of the
terrain, making the terrain appear less/more detailed but improving
the applications performance
Height- Scales the maximum height of the terrain
Wireframe - turns on/off
Grid - turns on/off
Detail/Color/Lighting - Tucson corresponding texture map on/off
Color Mode - sets how the the detail and color maps interact
with each other: add, add minus half or multiplying color values.
Fog - on/off, change near and far plane of fog as well as clipping
plane for scene
Underground - clips water to perimeter of map, draws an underground
section of terrain
Material - changes the underground material (texture/color)
Stretch - stretches the texture of the underground material texture
Scale - changes the scale of the underground material texture
Set Skybox - opens a dialog to change the textures of the skybox |
 Terraform
8 tools to change the terrain: raise, lower, level, grab,
smooth, erode, push and ramp. Use the left mouse button to apply the
tool.
Hold shift and move the mouse to change the radius of
the tool while your cursor is on the map.
Hold cntrl key while using raise or lower to reverse the
action, using while level constrains the height of the level
You can undo/redo your changes by using the menu or cntrl-z/cntrl-shift-z
Terraforming automatically updates the lighting and shadows
(if enabled), applying the tool to larger parts of the map will effect
the response of recalculating the lighting
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The tools are pretty self explanatory,
play with them to find out what they all do.
Softness controls the strength relative to the center to the
end of the radius. 1 is really soft, 0 is hard and applies the
same force within the radius.
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Detail
Paint 4 or 8 detail textures (depending on the map you
create)
Hold shift and move the mouse to change the radius of
the tool while your cursor is on the map.
You can undo/redo your changes by using the menu or cntrl-z/cntrl-shift-z
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Click on each detail texture to paint
with it on the map
With the current detail texture selected you can set a new detail
texture and change the parameters
Height forces your brush to draw at the applied height within
a specified range.
Slope forces your detail brush to only draw on parts of the map
with a certain slope angle, you can toggle multiple slope angles
to increase the range |
Paint
Paint color and texture to the color map using the material
palette and picker
Hold shift and move the mouse to change the radius of
the tool while your cursor is on the map.
Hold the control key and the cursor will change to an
eyedropper which can be used to set the current color to selected pixel
color off of the color map.
You can undo/redo your changes by using the menu or cntrl-z/cntrl-shift-z
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You can store and use 6 materials
to the color panel and adjust the parameters of each one individually
You can select color/texture to paint with by using the material
picker and palette
Height forces your brush to draw at the applied height within
a specified range
Slope forces your detail brush to only draw on parts of the map
with a certain slope, you can toggle multiple slope angles to
increase the range
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 Lighting
Adjust lighting and shadows, generate new lightmaps for
the map
When this tool is enabled, an arrow appears in the center
of the screen. Holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse adjusts
the light direction. Regenerating the lightmap or terraforming the terrain
will change the lightmap.
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Generate Entire Lightmap - re-lights
the lightmap
Ambient/Light - changes the ambient and strength of the light
Direction/Pitch - adjust the direction of the light
Shadows - enables/disables generation of soft shadows
Shadow Dist - sets the maximum distance a shadow can go
Falloff - adjust the softness of the shadow over distance |
 Water
Enable/disable water and change it's height, scale, distortion
and color
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The water is pretty self explanatory,
play with parameters to find out what they all do.
You can further modify the way the distortion and water looks
by changing the uvdv and normal map textures, they are found in
data/textures of your earthsculptor directory. You can use Nvidia
texture tools with photoshop to create new ones. |
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CREATING A NEW MAP
To create a new map go to the menu file->new, you will
be presented with the new map panel where you can select the size of
the terrain and size of the color detail and lighting texture maps.
Texture splitting splits all the texture maps into 4 or
16 separate smaller sized textures by splitting the texturemap once(1)
or twice(2) respectively, this improves performance painting the maps
on large maps as only the affected textures needs to be updated.
Detail textures allows you to set the number of detail
textures you can use in the terrain, 4 or 8
RGB lighting allows you to use RGB color to define the
lighting of the lightmap alternatively to just grayscale lighting.
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MAP FORMAT
EarthSculptor outputs the maps as follows
mapName.map - this is an ascii file containing all the
parameters, colors, texture names used in the map
mapName.png - this is a 16-bit grayscale png representing
the height values of the map
mapName_l.png - this is the lightmap of the map
mapName_c.png - this is the colormap of the map
mapName_d.png - this is the detailmap texture of the map,
each channel represents one of the four detail textures that make up
the detail textures.
mapName_dd.png - this is the second detailmap texture
of the map if your map is supporting 8 detail textures, each channel
represents one of the four detail textures that make up the last 4 detail
textures.
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TIPS AND TRICKS
Working with external tools to change your terrain
and color texture map
You can work with the terrain and color map in an external
editor while you work in EarthSculptor. Open or create a new map, go
to menu utility->explore, open the mapName.png and/or mapName_c.png
in your favorite image editor, modify the map or colormap and save it
in your image editor, in EarthSculptor go to menu utility->reload
height map and/or utility->reload texture map. You can re-light the
map and work between applications to create your terrain. This is also
a quick method of importing heightmaps, geographic images and overlays
into EarthSculptor from external sources.
Changing Existing Maps
All old maps will have to reset their ambient and light values in lighting
and recalculate, since EarthSculptor switched to RGB color support for
lightmaps (note that it still works with grayscale lightmaps as default).
Modifying Existing Maps
LightMap
To change lightmap RGB/Grayscale, simply open the lightmap .png in an
image program and set the image to grayscale or RGB.
DetailMap
To have 8 detail textures, just create or remove an additional detailmap
with the format detailmap_dd.png (it has two 'd's)
Texture Splitting
This is hard to do. You have to modify the .map file to have 1 or 2
divisions (default is 0), and split the tile texture manually for each
lightmap, detailmap and colormap into (4 or 16 separate files) of the
current size divided by 2 or 4 (1 and 2 divisions respectively)
Note that to simply change the content of any of the light/color/detail
maps or any of the textures, you can always re-load them in the program
from the utility menu. This makes for effective use of other image applications
to modify your heightmap
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