This section includes sample pictures made with Leveller. Although Leveller's OpenGL and raytracing renderers can produce good results, some of the images were finalized with another program. The main purpose of the gallery is to showcase Leveller's diverse heightfield shaping abilities, since it is primarily a modeler.
Most people use Leveller for traditional landscapes, but as these samples show, you can let your imagination run pretty wild.
For a gallery of older images, check out the picture archive.
Animations in Bink format require a Bink player, available at RAD Game Tools.
POV-Ray Star Wars spacecraft models
courtesy of D. M. Beattie.
'Star Wars' and all associated images, designs and trademarks are copyright
(c) 1997 Lucasfilm Ltd, and are used here without permission.
Images and text Copyright Daylon Graphics Ltd. except where noted. For more information please consult our picture usage policy.
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Colorado Landcover
Leveller 2.6 showing a landcover texture attached to a one-degree DEM, both imported from the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium site. The elevations were exaggerated vertically and the results raytraced.
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Georeferenced Texture
Leveller 2.6 showing a hi-res GeoTIFF map of central Pennsylvania using a UTM coordinate system reprojected and placed on a northeastern United States DEM having a latitude/longitude system. Vertical scale has been exaggerated to show the mountains better. The map is several hundred kilometers wide and raytraced to show more texture detail.
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Waves
A page of several wave formations, made with Leveller 2.6.
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Desert Scenes
A page of several desert images, made and rendered with Leveller 2.5.
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Alien Scenes
A page of several alien images, made and rendered with Leveller 2.5.
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Scanline Renderings
Ray's experimenting with scanline rendering code, and these are some of the results. The heightfield has a fractal subdivision displacement shader applied to it.
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Rocky Ground
Two rocks repeated numerous times according to an exported POV-Ray position array. Four close-together point lights simulate area lighting, with some sharpening, gamma, and histogram changes afterwards. Try not to think about walking on it barefoot.
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Leveller 2.3 Splash Screen
Two small ellipsoid gforge heightfields with a hi-res eroded gforge texture, repeated thousands of times with POV-Ray to make an asteroid belt.
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Asteroids
Two 128 x 128 heightfields distorted into oblong spheroids by Leveller 2.3 and rendered with the Aqsis REYES renderer.
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Designer Fruit
With UV displacement mapping, Leveller 2.3 did this imaginary fruit by warping a set of smoothed parallel lines onto a sphere. The flattening at the pole was done by selecting a horizontal strip of the heightfield at its top, feathering it, and then flattening. The heightfield is shown below.
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Bumpy Earth
With UV displacement mapping, Leveller 2.3 did this vertical exaggeration of the Earth by mapping a Mercator heightfield onto a sphere.
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Alternate 2.1 Splash Screen (JPEG, 964 x 190, 64K)
This was the runner-up splash screen picture candidate for Leveller 2.1. It's a clipped set of overlapped bubbles rendered in POV-Ray with a reflected specular finish and a low-noise environment map.
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Movie Samples (BIK format, various)
Some sample movies made with the Leveller's animation facility and assembled with the RAD Video Tools.
Solid crater (525 K)
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Raytracing Samples (JPEG, various)
Some sample images made with the raytracer in Leveller 1.4.
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Unpublished Leveller Article (HTML)
A forgotten article that was supposed to be published by a third-party newsletter website in 1999. An interesting bit of old Leveller nostalgia, but also a handy overview of Leveller for new users.
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Alien World #2 (JPEG, 640 x 480, 66K)
After creating a large set of random cones using the Mt. Fractal plug-in, we ran it through the Mound 1.2 plug-in which has a terrace-before-mounding option. The result was then inverted and textured.
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Nibbled Cereal (JPEG, 640 x 480, 51K)
We extracted a heightfield from a scanned photo of Kellogg's Corn Pops® cereal, which was clipped and inverted. The original photo was then used to texture the heightfield, and then rendered in POV-Ray to add shadows.
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Scorched (JPEG, 480 x 270, 37K)
After terracing a gforge hill, each plateau was processed by the Mound plug-in. The result was flattened and contrast boosted, and rendered using the Mars colormap.
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Terragen Example (JPEG, 400 x 300, 24K)
Alessandro Falappa did this picture in February 1999. It's a ridged multifractal noise pattern rendered in Terragen, with some light retouching.
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False Micrograph (JPEG, 512 x 384, 35K)
Ray spent several hours testing Leveller 1.3, and after terracing and deterracing a pattern, came up with this image, which looks like an electron micrograph of, uh, something or other. But that's Leveller's charm; one can discover neat-looking things just by experimenting with it.
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At Least the Termites Can Spell (JPEG, 320 x 240, 38K)
Here's a closeup of what the Bevel plug-in can do to the edges of text, rendered in POV-Ray. The area outside the text was roughened using the Mound plug-in.
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Winter Forest (640 x 480, JPEG, 91K)
This is a sample rendition from our POV-Ray Forest tutorial. It was done by using a plasma fractal bump map with the Superpatch version of POV-Ray 3.1a (so that we could use slope-dependant texturing). The frozen river uses a gforge bump map with the bump_size value greatly exaggerated. The trees come from the Genesis Toolkit.
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Alien World (700 x 140, JPEG, 34K)
After using the Bubbles plug-in, the remaining flat area of the heightfield was selected with the Magic Wand tool and raised by the Mound plug-in. The selection marquee was inverted to select the bubbles, and they were 'mounded' as well. This image was featured in our Leveller advertisement in the August/September 1999 issues of Computer Graphics World magazine.
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Deep Impact (411 x 300, JPEG, 22K)
While researching ways to produce craters procedurally (so that we can upgrade the Crater tool), we made this heightfield by hand with the Mound plug-in and the Dig/Raise tools. This image was used in our Leveller advertisement in the July 1999 issue of Computer Graphics World magazine.
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Rock Climber's Paradise (378 x 252, JPEG, 29K)
This heightfield was created by importing a bitmap that had random contrasting gray areas motion blurred.
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Fractal Serenity (387 x 208, JPEG, 41K)
This is a deeply magnified part of the Mandelbrot set colored with a custom colormap. We came across it while testing the Mandelbrot plug-in.
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Flight of the Ruffles® (435 x 412, JPEG, 16K)
The Wavy Terrain plug-in was used on a 128 x 128 heightfield, with the center offset far enough to make the ridges nearly straight. After smoothing twice, a circular area was selected and exported to POV-Ray using the Cylinder plug-in to bend the resulting triangle mesh into an arc. The mesh was declared as an object and used several times with different positions, scales, and angles. The chips are white, but illuminated with two brownish-yellow lights, and a bump pattern was applied to roughen them. |
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Frozen Trail (400 x 300, JPEG, 40K)
This is the same heightfield data and texture as used in 'The Natural Look', but closer up and with specular/reflective lighting in POV-Ray. The heightfield measures 450 x 350 grid units. |
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The Palace Ceiling at Midnight (603 x 462, JPEG, 59K)
This image was done by bending a 64 x 64 heightfield into a parabolic bowl, mosaicing it with 2 x 2 tiles, and then sharpening twice. |
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Fun with Text (560 x 184, JPEG, 17K)
Trying out some deep and smooth text, with textured water partly filling it. The image was captured directly from the Leveller scene view. |
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Splash Screen (328 x 160, JPEG, 14K)
Leveller 1.0's splash screen picture. Mosaic filter and Text tools used. Texture done in PaintShop Pro. Rendered with POV-Ray. |
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The Natural Look (291 x 252, JPEG, 26K)
Ray took a photo of actual rocks at the beach, and used a grayscale version to create the heightfield. The photo was then applied as a texture, with Leveller's quick shading disabled so that only the shadows in the photo would be used. The result is a perspective view of the photo with a much greater three-dimensional quality than simply texturing a flat plane. |
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Mess on Ceres (800 x 600, JPEG, 85K)
After exporting every point in a 32 x 32 grid to POV-Ray 3.1, Ray wrote a POV script to randomly connect the points with dirty chrome cylinders. The heightfield was given a dark noisy texture, and the final rendition had its contrast boosted to give it a starker look. |
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Alien Garden (413 x 282, JPEG, 40K)
Ray created a small set of circles surrounding each other, pushed them up using the Raise tool, smoothed it, cloned the result numerous times in a choppy manner, and then scaled everything 300% with a final smoothing after that. A greenish bitmap texture completes the scene. |
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Mount Surreal (640 x 480, JPEG, 96K)
Leveller 0.991 added groundpoint exporting, which was used to generate the POV-Ray 3.1 array data for this picture. |
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The Borg Assimilate the Empire (800 x 450, JPEG, 108K)
The Borg cube is three heightfields arranged so that their edges meet. The tractor beam, background stars, and ship damage were added using Adobe PhotoShop. |
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The Borg Attack Luke (640 x 480, JPEG, 81K)
The texture was done in PaintShop Pro. The laser beam was added using Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop. The copper tubing was done using a POV-Ray script. |
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Luke Attacks the Borg (320 x 240, JPEG, 27K)
Here, only a single heightfield was used. The texture and lights were done in PaintShop Pro. The Death Star trench could probably be convincingly modeled with five long heightfields. |
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Fantasy Island (605 x 437, JPEG, 56K)
The water, sky, and the imagemap were done in POV-Ray. The beaches, horizon, and sun were added using Photoshop. The nearer hill had noise added to make it look grassy. |
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X-Wings over Mars (800 x 540, JPEG, 122K)
The very first 'quality' rendering Ray did with Leveller, POV-Ray, and third-party spacecraft models. |
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Rocky Shoal (512 x 240, JPEG, 50K)
The Noise Adder plug-in filter was used a few times, then smoothed. The water and texturing were added in POV-Ray. |
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Interference (639 x 417, JPEG, 61K)
Done with the Wavy Terrain plug-in filter. PaintShop Pro was used to duplicate and offset the ring pattern afterwards. This type of effect can now be done directly in Leveller. |
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Yellow Canyon (640 x 480, JPEG, 55K)
Done with the Terrace and Smooth filters. Positioning the light source has to be done carefully, and the heightfield has to be very high-res or the edges of each plateau will show 'gridding'. |
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Rice Fields (640 x 480, JPEG, 76K)
The Terrace filter again. Ray worked at an improper scale, and significant gridding resulted. The next version of this piece will be better, but we included this one to show clearly what gridding is. PaintShop Pro was used to extract the contour edges for the image map. |
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Strange Growth (640 x 480, JPEG, 46K)
Playing around with the Crater tool, and then inverting and scaling the results. |
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Gray Matter (320 x 240, JPEG, 24K)
This is what happens when you use the Combine filter to add the results of the Wavy Terrain and Fractal Plasma filters. You can also subtract, union, intersect, and difference. |
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Raised Text (640 x 480, JPEG, 42K)
The text tool combined with the Combine filter puts the name of Leveller above the peak. Leveller can now do this without the Combine filter. |
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More Fractals (640 x 480, JPEG, 71K)
The Mount Fractal plug-in filter brings more fractal landscaping abilities.
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