This is a collection of images made both by us and by Leveller users, for various purposes (art, marketing, diagrams, etc.). They were used and then filed away, but they may be fun or useful to someone, so they've been placed here. They don't constitute the entire history of our website imagery, but certainly a large part of it. Leveller is many things to many people. No matter what else happens, it's rewarding to see things that otherwise might never have been. We are the richer for it. Images and text Copyright Daylon Graphics Ltd. except where noted. Leveller 0.1 (GIF, 640 x 480, 65K) It's amazing what a few years can do. Seriously, though, this is what Leveller started out as. No MFC, no OpenGL, no MDI, no toolbars. Just a green wireframe that you could deform by firing lasers at. Of course, people had all sorts of helpful suggestions, and one thing led to another. Colormaps (JPEG, 477 x 360, 46K) This shows how some of the available colormaps look on a small gforge heightfield. Untitled Abstract (JPEG, 400 x 320, 25K) Ray was experimenting with Leveller's raytracer, the Spectrum colormap, and a random heightfield cut through with the Lines filter. Mick's Celtic Scene (JPEG, 406 x 306, 25K) Mick Hazelgrove did this with POV-Ray and some interesting texture work. Hole (JPEG, 350 x 352, 21K) Shortly after getting the noise shader to bumpmap properly in 3D, Ray made a deep depression, raytraced it, and then replaced the bottom with flat light blue, giving the illusion of being in a hole looking up. Deterrace Example (JPEG, 316 x 236, 18K) It's easier to show what the Deterrace filter does than to explain it. But verbally, it takes a terraced heightfield and tries to turn it back into a normal one. The top picture shows the "Before" image, and the bottom one the "After". Level Connect Example (JPEG, 210 x 166, 3K) If Deterrace was hard to explain in words, then Kari Kivisalo's level connection filter was downright impossible. The pictures show how one can the connect flat areas between prominent regions with smooth slopes. Leveller Library Example (291 x 160, JPEG, 8K) We made a small C library with which people could use to procedurally generate Leveller heightfields, and our example generator produced radial waveforms with non-constant amplitude. Lighting Performance (469 x 237, GIF, 46K) The raytracer had one nice time-saving feature: one could change lighting position and relight the heightfield in seconds, since the raytracer caches the ray-heightfield intersection results and doesn't need to recompute the depth map. The image shows how the first render takes a minute, and then each subsequent lighting change only takes two seconds each. As Leveller's rendering features are meant for prototyping, these kinds of features make sense. PowerLine Tool Example (480 x 320, JPEG, 102K) Mark Wilkinson sent in a Terragen picture he did after editing a Leveller heightfield with the PowerLine tool plug-in, to create the road. Hmm... if one can't take the road less travelled, one can always make it. Leveller 2.2 Splash Screen (490 x 102, JPEG, 9K) For 2.2, Ray wanted something that would communicate precision, since gridlines had been introduced. So he used the Rubber Stamp tool to replicate Leveller's "L" logo dozens of times. To assign each one a different shade of gray, he used the Classic Gray colormap and with the Magic Wand tool raised and lowered each "L" to a random height. The center "L" he raised above the rest to make it brightest. Then it was just a matter of exporting the scene pane and cropping. Leveller 2.0 Splash Screen (490 x 102, JPEG, 9K) Ray took a cratered heightfield, added some POV-Ray texture and media effects, and then squashed the image horizontally. Although Leveller 2.0 was supposed to contain more features, it was still a significant update (especially considering that Ray was fully employed by Electronic Arts at the time), and we wanted a picture that conveyed how much Leveller can empower people to effect change. The Snow Shader (544 x 499, GIF, 108K) In April 2002, after finally getting around to developing a Snow raytracing shader, we made this picture to let people know about it. Ramp Tool Examples (320 x 240, JPEG, 27K) We ran this picture to show what the Ramp tool could do. It's a POV-Ray rendition, because Leveller's raytracer doesn't cast shadows. Leveller Animation Ad (453 x 644, JPEG, 80K) Animation was added as a Leveller 1.x item. At first, we were reluctant, because it wasn't really a core feature in a modeler. However, other terrain visualizers provided fly-through abilities, so we felt we needed to offer them too. We did a simple implementation, however, keeping it in line with Leveller's prototyping philosophy. In retrospect, the animation system impacted other areas to a greater-than-anticipated degree and took a lot longer to add, because of things like frame captioning. If we had to do it over again, it's doubtful it would have made it. On the other hand, arduous lessons are extremely valuable. WCS Import/Export Example (600 x 400, JPEG, 60K) We took a popular World Construction Set terrain file and imported it into Leveller using its WCS plug-in, and then exported it back to ELEV format for rendering in WCS. The camera angles in both programs were arranged to match as closely as possible. Buildings (493 x 339, JPEG, 28K) Ray was doing a GIS project for someone, and part of it called for rendering buildings, which Leveller (thanks to its reference shape feature) is capable of to a modest degree. The building textures were taken from an old DOS video game Ray wrote in 1992. Misty Cave (400 x 300, JPEG, 10K) Alex Magidow provided us this image to go along with a testimonial, but he already had a quotation on the Testimonials page, so we included his POV-Ray picture here. Ground fog is lovely when used well, as it is here. TMesh Plug-in(600 x 318, GIF, 47K) John Ratcliff (a game developer then working for Verant) developed an optimized mesh export for Leveller based on the RTIN (Right Triangle Irregular Network) algorithm. If you had a modeler that could read the VRML 1.0 files the plug-in generated, you were in business. Perlin4 Plug-in (471 x 507, GIF, 89K) John Ratcliff also developed the Perlin4 plug-in, so named because it blends up to four user-defined Perlin noise layers to create a wide assortment of terrains. Vegetation Plug-in (400 x 185, GIF, 41K) With the addition of viewer plug-ins, Ray whipped up a simple OpenGL-based vegetation displayer. It works by simply placing lit gray cones within the currently selected region according to user-definable density parameters. Old Site Banners (JPEG, 700 x 131) Blasts from the past. As Leveller became a capable viewer, we started producing site banners with it. We'd make a new image about once a week to showcase something interesting or some new feature that had been added.                   Leveller and POV-Ray Ad (GIF, 655 x 327, 59K) Leveller grew out of a POV-Ray utility (NavCam) and its POV-Ray support remains one of its strongest features. To highlight that connection, we ran this ad. The integration looked so strong, however, that several people asked if Leveller was running POV-Ray as a child process, or had Leveller become a POV-Ray plug-in? The "Fly with Us" Ad (GIF, 606 x 219, 33K) We ran this to appeal to terrain visualization users, because Leveller was young and it's modeling abilities were still being developed. It didn't run for long, however, because neither the picture nor the text really sizzled, and ultimately it conveyed the wrong impression. Leveller is a modeler, and we eventually realized that, regardless of how well or poorly it fulfilled that role, that was what we had to tell people. The "Volcano" Ad (GIF, 700 x 350, 60K) Ray felt it was time to have some fun when he came up with this, and everyone who's seen it indeed gets a good laugh. But seriously, Leveller doesn't get its name that way. :) Although it was funny, the ad was confusing. People generally buy a modeler to build scenes, not destroy them. It might be fun to whip up the Land of Mordor now and then, but it's not what most users need Leveller for. The Leveller 1.4 Ad (GIF, 623 x 359, 77K) There was a time when Leveller's raytracer was new, and we needed a compelling way to demonstrate what it offered. Although the raytracer isn't designed to compete with standalone renderers, it provided an immediately accessible way to visualize certain colormaps better. It was also a good way to show people that we took the user experience seriously, and were working hard to make them more productive. The Splash Screen Ad (JPEG, 700 x 341, 34K) Leveller's first splash screen was always a neat picture. It was done using a modified colormap-derived texture and then rendered in POV-Ray with specular lighting. Laying the text onto an undulating terrain and then mosaicing it into little tiles produced something refreshingly different. The image was re-rendered larger and dimmed to support overlaying the ad copy. The idea we wanted to convey was that one didn't have to just do terrain with Leveller -- there was a whole new interesting world opening up. Leveller 2.1 Ad (555 x 669, GIF, 68K) Upon returning from Electronic Arts in February 2002, Ray was finally able to update Leveller 2.0. Although the plug-in tool API was a critical addition, the more visible feature was interactive dot-product lighting, so we had the splash screen indicate that. Leveller 2.2 Ad (550 x 666, JPEG, 105K) September 11, 2002 was the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. It was also the debut of Leveller 2.2, which ran with this ad. The coincidence was certainly strange, and an unfortunate downer on what would otherwise have been a happy day. But the lesson wasn't lost on us, which is to keep doing our best even when things aren't going so great. Leveller 2.2 was more or less "the gamer's release", because it provided features game developers had long asked for, such as gridlines, markers, global navigation, and better interoperability with other programs. It also provided the first public binary heightfield clipboard format, which hopefully will make exchanging elevation data as easy as copying and pasting it.