New Map Sculpting Software

[Redrobes]

Nice. Are the height maps imported / exported as 16 bit heights or 8 bit. Usually in height maps you use a 16 bit or float value for them but often with fragment shaded effects the height map is stored as a texture. But I know that it is possible to have float textures - its just not common.

[Mavichist]

I'm using shader buffers, not textures. There are certain advantages, even though I'm forgoing innate sampling functions and whatnot. 8 bit causes stepping and other visual artifacts. 16 bit... I didn't try it, I don't know whether it would be accurate enough. At the moment I'm using 32 bit.

[Rwhyte]

Nice, that export looks good. 16 or 32 bit was going to be my next question. As I understand it, 16 bit would still only provide integer heights? (though much greater range over 8 bit), and depending on the scaling of the scene, that could still lead to stepped terrain. And so with 32 bit, you can have decimal heights with very subtle vertical detail. Plus, a lot of existing elevation data is in a 32 bit image format, and there’d be no need to convert or rescale. All very promising!