4.10 Making Terrains
If you enjoy using Fractint for making landscapes, we have several new
features for you to work with. When doing 3d transformations banding
tends to occur because all pixels of a given height end up the same
color. Now, colors can be randomized to make the transitions between
different colors at different altitudes smoother. Use the new
"RANDOMIZE= " variable to accomplish this. If your light source images
all look like lunar landscapes since they are all monochrome and have
very dark shadows, we now allow you to set the ambient light for
adjusting the contrast of the final image. Use the "Ambient= " variable.
In addition to being able to create scenes with light sources in
monochrome, you can now do it in full color as well. Setting fullcolor=1
will generate a Targa-24 file with a full color image which will be a
combination of the original colors of the source image (or map file if
you select map=something) and the amount of light which reflects off a
given point on the surface. Since there can be 256 different colors in
the original image and 256 levels of light, you can now generate an
image with *lots* of colors. To convert it to a GIF if you can't view
Targa files directly, you can use PICLAB (see Other Programs (p. 203)),
and the following commands:
SET PALETTE 256
SET CREZ 8
TLOAD yourfile.tga
MAKEPAL
MAP
GSAVE yourfile.gif
EXIT
Using the full color option allows you to also set a haze factor with
the "haze= " variable to make more distant objects more hazy.
As a default, full color files also have the background set to sky blue.
Warning, the files which are created with the full color option are very
large, 3 bytes per pixel. So be sure to use a disk with enough space.
The file is created using Fractint's disk-video caching, but is always
created on real disk (expanded or extended memory is not used.) Try the
following settings of the new variables in sequence to get a feel for
the effect of each one:
;use this with any filltype
map=topo
randomize=3; adjusting this smooths color transitions
;now add this using filltype 5 or 6
ambient=20; adjusting this changes the contrast
filltype=6
smoothing=2; makes the light not quite as granular as the terrain
;now add the following, and this is where it gets slow
fullcolor=1; use PICLAB to reduce resulting lightfile to a GIF
;and finally this
haze=20; sets the amount of haze for distant objects
When full color is being used, the image you see on the screen will
represent the amount of light being reflected, not the colors in the
final image. Don't be disturbed if the colors look weird, they are an
artifact of the process being used. The image being created in the
lightfile won't look like the screen.
However, if you are worried, hit ESC several times and when Fractint
gets to the end of the current line it will abort. Your partial image
will be there as LIGHT001.TGA or with whatever file name you selected
with the lightname option. Convert it as described above and adjust any
parameters you are not happy with. Its a little awkward, but we haven't
figured out a better way yet.