How can you effectively guage scale in Wilbur?

[Colesy]

Hello.

I'm used to hand painting small heightmaps in Photoshop and I've become used to using hex codes to pick my colors for certain elevations. Recently I've begun using Wilbur for a much larger scale project and I've had a little trouble understanding the scale in Wilbur. I've gone through all of the tutorials, though I still can't manage to figure out how to set up the proper map information, or the vertical scale in the 3D preview without being totally clueless as to what those settings changed.

In my current project, I need my ground level (right above sea level) to be very specific but I can't determine what tool I need to use to get the terrain to that level. When I play around with the tools and their settings, the result always seems to be something totally off, like my coastline being a giant cliff when I wanted it to be a smooth beach. I'd imagine that's partly because I haven't yet understood how the scaling works. Would someone mind explaining it?

[waldronate]

The simplest way to deal with heights in Wilbur is to declare 0 as sea level, positive values as land, and negative values as sea. Define each unit of altitude in Wilbur as 1 real-world unit such as meters or feet. For the map extents, you can most simply define the edges as plus and minus half your image resolution (e.g. a 2048x2048 image would extend from -1024 to +1024 in each direction). This coordinate system makes it easier to deal with the 3d preview.

[waldronate]

There are a few places in Wilbur where you want to specify the map edges in degrees of latitude and longitude rather than as arbitrary units (e.g. the V2 shader). For those cases, the Vertical Scale control on the Heightfield 3D Preview window is useful for adjusting the heights down to reasonable-appearing value.

If you need to adjust the altitude to get a particular altitude at 0, the Filter>>Mathematical>>Offset filter will add a particular value to every sample on the surface (e.g. to move everything down by 23 units to flood a bit of land, use the offset filter with a value of -23). To scale height above zero and/or below zero to a precise range, use Window>>Histogram to find the current surface minimum and maximum. Use Select>>From Terrain>> Height Range and specify a low of 0 and a high of 100000. Then use Filter>>Mathematical>>Scale with a value of (desiredMax/currentMax calculated via some external program such as the Windows calculator) to scale the above-sea levels. Repeat, selecting a height range of -1000000 and 0 as the min and max, then scale by (-desiredMin/currentMin).