- Now we will need to create more maps so L3DT can create us the final texture. We don’t need the water map since this won’t really create us a body of water, just paint a blue texture on the landscape. We can add water in TV later quite easily.
- Click Operations → Attributes map → Generate map, this is a map used by L3DT to define land types so we don’t need to save it.
- Altough we can generate the texture map already at this point, there are a few more steps we must take if we want a lightmap imbued in our texture. The lightmap will create shadows in our texture and produces a very realistic effect. It is also better to have a lightmap for your landscape texture instead of dynamic textures when it comes to performace. If you still don’t want shadows in your landscape you can proceed to the Texture map generation step,
- Click Operations → Terrain normals → Generate map, this will be needed for L3DT to calculate the lightmap, but you don’t need to save this map either.
- Now click Operations → Light map → Generate map. You will see a new screen this time. In this screen you can tell L3DT how shadows should behave. Sunlight controls the color of your light. You can leave it at 100 for R,G,B if you want daylight effect or something like 100R, 80G and 30B for dusk time. Let’s leave the ambient light at 100 for both Red Green and Blue. You can also control the sun position by setting the Azimute and the altitude in degrees but let’s leave it with the default values for this sample. The brightness setting will control the intensity of the light. If you want a darker light choose a lower value, if you want brighter light use a higher value. You can set brightness to a value higher than 1 but be carefull when you do it, it may burn the colors of your final texture. Once again we don’t need to save this map.
- When the lightmap generation is complete we can proceed to create the final texture, the one that will be used in TV. Simply click Operations → Texture map → Generate map. This is what i got :
- We need to save this map. Click File → Export → Active map. Again saving in BMP will produce better quality landscapes.
- At this point we’re done with L3DT. Let’s close it and proceed to coding.