Last updated: June 4, 2009   The Essentials I need help using Leveller. What is Leveller? Can you show me some screenshots? What are heightfields? What are the advantages of using Leveller? Who uses Leveller? What are Vectre and XaoS? What do they do? Where can I get DEMs and links to other stuff? What is GIS? Does it matter?   Licencing Why use Leveller when there's all sorts of free stuff on the Web? Can I licence or update Leveller using PayPal? Can I licence or update Leveller without a credit card? Is Leveller available on CD-ROM or in a physical package? Is Leveller 2.6 still available? Are there any retail store dealers for Leveller? Are dealer inquires welcome? Are there student discounts, corporate, multi-user and/or site licences available? A vendor screwed up my order. Can I bug you about it? I'm a BS Geoformer user. Am I supported? I'm a TerrainTek Golf Course Designer user. Am I supported?   Product Replacement I need to reinstall Leveller, but I lost my setup file. How do I get a replacement?   Upgrading How do I maintain Leveller after installing it? Are updates expensive? How do I request an update? I need a custom feature added. Can I do it, or can you or someone else do it?   Installation, Configuration, Performance How many pixels can my heightfields have? Editing is really choppy, and/or everything is slow. What's going on? I get a message saying something about "missing export MFC42.DLL:6453" Leveller doesn't run on my system Is Leveller multithreaded? I see black areas and/or other display artifacts. My flat-panel/LCD/plasma display flickers. What's going on?   Using Leveller Why don't some plug-ins load? I want to draw cool stuff, but Leveller only lets me shape the heightfield I want to make a texture based on what I see in the overhead map view Can I drape textures over heightfields? Can I place 3D objects onto my heightfields? Can I use a graphics tablet or a Tablet PC with Leveller?   Data Exchange Which file formats does Leveller support? Which programs can exchange clipboard data with Leveller? Why do exported images look weird? Can I use shapefiles? My Second Life terrain has artifacts when running the SL viewer. Are any Pixar Renderman(tm) shaders available for exported RIB files?   Existensialism Are there any tutorials available? Is there a mailing list available to discuss Leveller? What are raytracing and scanline rendering? Can I use pictures from this site? I need help using Leveller. Registered Leveller users can get support during normal Pacific Time business hours by contacting support@daylongraphics.com.   What is Leveller? Leveller was designed to provide full editing capabilities for heightfields, with explicit support for heightfields used to model terrain. There are other uses too, such as bumpmaps. If you just need some random-looking bumpy terrain, Leveller may be overdoing it. You need Leveller, however, if you want to shape the heightfield to anything more specific -- carving your name in sand, making vehicle tracks, cleaning up DEM artifacts, quickly experimenting with filters, removing a hill that blocks an otherwise perfect view, etc. If you're not keen on editing but need to acquire or transfer elevation data between different formats, Leveller is also good at that. Leveller also makes it easy to get the perfect view of your heightfield -- you just fly around and the camera angle is yours. Leveller also includes OpenGL and raytraced rendering facilities for quick scene prototyping. There is also an article on Wikipedia describing Leveller.   What are the advantages of using Leveller? Focus. Generally, a specific tool like Leveller will be faster and more pleasant than trying to adapt something else. Many people use paint programs to edit heightfield data, but that's not their intended purpose, and after five minutes of using Leveller the reason becomes obvious. In Leveller, you can actually see what you're doing, in two and in three dimensions, in realtime. Leveller's editing and selection tools are geared to the image pixels containing elevation values, not colors. Leveller's filters also take into account that elevation artifacts are much more noticeable than color artifacts.   Simplicity. A lot of Leveller customers also use high-end GIS tools. For smaller tasks, however, those packages tend to be overkill. Leveller launches in a few seconds, its main executable is only a few megabytes, and the user interface deals only with the basic necessities.   Precision. Leveller stores and maintains elevation data at 32-bit resolution. It's possible to create very flat areas with complex elevation texturing, and still have large peaks. One can also scale supposedly flat areas to reveal otherwise unnoticeable elevation differences. You can also get at individual pixels if you want.   Flexibility. A good editor exhibits atomicity; i.e., the ability to perform work on the smallest units of data in a document (in this case, pixels). At the other end, it should also provide facilities such as filters, to make large-scale changes easy. Leveller also includes a third-party plug-in facility with a freely available Software Developer's Kit.   Affordability. A powerful program is of little use if it can't be licenced within one's budget. We go to extreme lengths to keep costs down, and we pass the savings on to our customers. Our licences are also on a per-person basis, not per-CPU. You don't pay a lot, but you get a lot.   Speed. Our software isn't developed on the latest-greatest machines that are more powerful than everyone else's. We use hardware which is a year or two behind the bleeding edge, so if Leveller runs well on it, it will do the same (or better) out in the field. We're forced to come up with some fairly optimized code, but that's the way we like it. We're also leveraging today's multiprocessor environment by adding more multithreaded code.   Reliability. We employ engineering practices that make Leveller extremely reliable (like coding the entire thing in C++ and building our own memory usage manager). When you're working with large amounts of elevation data for long periods of time, uptime is a must. Leveller even includes runtime diagnostic and self-logging procedures.   Maintenance. Leveller is a living program -- it doesn't sit around stagnating while the rest of the world goes by. It's actively maintained to incorporate new features, improvements, and to stay abreast of new file formats and renderer features.   Support. We pride ourselves on responding to customers immediately, even if their questions take longer than that to resolve. As someone once said, "Customers are not the interruption of our work -- they are the cause of it." What issues there have been, we've typically resolved within days. Often, our turnaround is within 24 hours. We also develop custom plug-ins at reasonable rates.     Who uses Leveller? Many different types of people use Leveller, including: Game studios (including the biggest) and game level modifiers (e.g., Motocross Madness, Battlefield 1942) Geography/geology educators and their students Texture, bumpmap and displacement map artists Aircraft and other vehicle simulator developers Land management firms Landscape designers, surveyors and architects Golf course architects/designers GIS specialists Landscape artists Miners and geological analysts Cartographers Oceanographers Satellite data repair and enhancement specialists Scientific diagram illustrators Renderman™, POV-Ray™, VRML and Terragen™ users   What are Vectre and XaoS? What do they do? Daylon Vectre is a Bézier spline editor similar in operation to Adobe Illustrator. It was a testbed for the vector graphics features which are now operational in Leveller 3.0. One can use it to create overlay reference shapes and UV lathe splines for Leveller 2.3+. Vectre can also act as a simple Illustrator/ESRI shapefile viewer. It may be maintained as a vector editing trainer for Leveller. For more information, please click here. Daylon XaoS is our Leveller-friendly fractal imaging program, based on the Win32 port of the open source XaoS project. It is also a free download. For more information, please click here.   What is GIS? Does it matter? GIS is short for Geographic Information Systems. It's used more as an adjective to indicate that a program or process involves geographic data. There's a website here that goes into detail about it quite well. There's another site here which provides definitions of GIS terms. There's also the NOAA's Geodesy for the Layman. If you're just using heightfields to make terrain that provides ground in a basic game or local landscape scene, then GIS doesn't matter. But it can if you want to get more precise or work with other programs that use geographic measurement. An ambitious or planetary-style game could have enough terrain to cover most or all of an entire world, and at that point it makes sense to at least use latitude and longitude. Most casual terrain users get into GIS when they want to make maps, or acquire actual scanned terrain files and/or merge them to model large areas. The files are georeferenced, and to fit them together properly requires understanding geography a little (or at least having a program that does). Programs which are specifically geared towards landscape design and rendering also use geographic measurement. For example, if you want to position the sun, it's more natural to think in terms of inclination angle. Geography basically formalizes the whole issue of terrain measurement. The main thing is that since planets are spherical, latitude/longitude coordinates can't be directly used to compute distances -- e.g., one degree of longitude at the equator is a lot wider than it is near the North pole. It gets even more interesting when you want to be super-precise because the Earth isn't exactly a sphere. The distortion is tiny, but because the Earth is so large, positions can be off by a few kilometers if you assume a perfect sphere. Compounding the situation is that because people are relatively small, it's preferable to use different measurement systems for local areas, which opens up a whole field of converting between local and global coordinate systems. Elevations can also be tricky because they depend on what is meant by sea level, but the Earth's oceans don't actually have a constant sea level. Leveller can use local or projected/geographic coordinate systems, or neither if you just want to use pixels. To keep things simple, rotated coordinate systems are not supported (i.e., DEM sides are always parallel to lines of longitude). Here are short descriptions of some common GIS terms: Arcsecond: 1/60th of an arcminute, or 1/3600th of a degree, equal to about 30 east-west meters at the Earth's equator and 30 meters north-south. DEMs which have a three-arcsecond gridposting (or spacing), for example, are 90-meter DEMs, although this terminology is not entirely accurate for DEMs not near the equator.   Dataset: Usually a collection of related DEM files. It is common practice, for example, for DEM suppliers to package DEMs which neighbour each other into a set.   Datum: a model of the Earth used to determine geographic measurements. Popular datums use flattened spheres (ellipsoids) to more accurately model the true shape of the Earth, since its rotation and uneven mass density distort it slightly. Datums are useful to accurately determine elevations, since they can provide a better measure of the distance between the Earth's surface (at a particular point) and its center. Because the Earth is actually an ellipsoid, its center is not a point but a line. Modern datums are based on precise satellite measurements of the Earth's regional gravitational forces and are periodically updated. The WGS84 datum is widely considered to be accurate enough for most purposes.   DEM: short for Digital Elevation Model, a file which is usually a georeferenced heightfield. Some DEMs are vector based, such as contour plots. Some DEMs are packaged as multiple files within a compressed archive file; the elevation data will be in one file, its descriptive metadata (header information) in another file, etc.   DTM: short for Digital Terrain Model, which is a DEM.   Latitude/longitude: how locations on planets are specified, usually used to indicate large areas and the locations of major items like countries, lakes, states, and cities. Lines of latitude and longitude correspond to the intersections of angles from the planet's center with its surface, and are thus described in degrees. Longitude zero runs through Greenwich, England and latitude zero is the equator. The poles are at latitudes 90 degrees north and south and have undefined longitude. Since the Earth's land masses are continually moving, the concept of longitude zero is somewhat relative, but the motion is so small compared to the Earth that it can be effectively ignored. Fractions of degrees are (in decreasing magnitude) minutes and seconds, or more formally, arcminutes and arcseconds.   Georeference: to include geographical measurement data.   Great circle: an imaginary curved line whose length is the planet's circumference. Given any two surface points, the portion of the great circle intersecting them represents the shortest distance between those points. For this reason, long-range aircraft typically fly along great circles -- e.g., to travel efficiently from Chicago to Moscow, one would fly over Greenland.   Gridpost: analogous to a pixel in a heightfield. Gridposts represent fixed locations spaced equally distant from their neighbours and are arranged in a regular 2D array. The shorter the distance between gridposts, the tighter spacing a DEM has, and thus it has higher scan resolution since it shows more detail of the Earth's surface. Modern survey satellites can achieve around 5m or 1m spacing, and finer resolution is obtained using reconnaisance aircraft or ground surveys.   Projection: a way of mapping part or all of a planet's surface onto a flat surface. There are many ways to do this, each one being favored depending on the purpose. The most popular is probably the global Mercator projection, which preserves distances accurately at the equator but enlarges them greatly near the poles. For a temperate body such as the Earth, this works fairly well since most people do not live near the poles.   Shapefile: a file containing auxiliary data for a DEM, such as lot boundaries, road/street layouts, postal code regions and identifiers, etc. Shapefiles tend to be structured around vector geometry scenegraphs and database tables.   USGS: short for United States Geological Survey, an American government organization responsible for mapping the Earth's surface (with an obvious primary goal to map the United States in particular). Their expertise, large collection of data, and being a public body has resulted in their standards becoming common GIS industry standards.   UTM: short for Universal Tranverse Mercator, a common measurement system to make it easier to deal with local areas. The basic idea is to divide the Earth's surface into small patches and then use meters to measure distances and locations within each patch. UTM is popular with GPS device users, hikers, mapmakers, etc. The Mercator aspect derives from UTM being a distorted projection since distances and positions on UTM maps can be computed as if the Earth was flat. Each UTM patch (or zone) is small enough that the difference between the Mercator projection and the round Earth can be ignored.     Why should I use Leveller when there's all sorts of free stuff on the Web? It's possible to cobble together some kind of solution from the vast amount of free stuff out there. But Leveller provides a lot of it under one consistent, well-developed, and easy-to-use roof. Unlike most freeware, Leveller's user interface is an integral component and has been carefully implemented for strong ease of use. We don't write mostly engine-level code and put it up for people to wrangle with -- we provide a more complete solution that is based on user input, installs easily, is tested and well documented, and gets you quickly moving forward. And as a registered user, you'll enjoy vendor-level support, update benefits, fast issue resolution, not being told to RTFM, and the confidence of using something that is actively maintained. If you're serious about terrain/heightfield modeling, then Leveller is a good investment.   Can I licence or update Leveller without a credit card? Yes. Mail a money order, bank draft, or certified cheque for $199.95 USD (or $50.00 if upgrading from 2.x, or $150 if upgrading from 1.x) per licence to: Daylon Graphics Ltd. P.O. Box 21055 Maple Ridge, BC Canada  V2X 1P7 Please include your name, return address, e-mail address, and PC name. You can also include your organization and department name if you want them to appear in the software. If ordering multiple licences or upgrades, you are eligible for a discount (see the bulk order discount rate table). Product shipping is done via HTTP download.   Is Leveller available on CD-ROM or in a physical package? One-off CD-ROMs (jewel case only) are available upon request for users without adequate Net access or who simply prefer physical media. The fee is $20 USD to cover burning and shipping. An official boxed package is unlikely.   Is Leveller 2.6 still available? Yes, there may be some licences still available from Digital River and Plimus at the older price of $149.95. To order, click here.   Are there any retail store dealers for Leveller? Are dealer inquires welcome? There are no retail store dealers available for Leveller at this time, since we have no physical media distribution. If that changes, dealer inquiries are certainly welcome. Inquires for electronic dealers are welcome for sites that do not operate merely as huge lists of freeware/shareware titles. No offence, but we prefer not to associate Leveller with such offerings.   Are there student discounts, corporate, multi-user and/or site licences available? Such licences are not available, but we do provide discounts for two or more orders. The current rate table is: Qty Discount --------------- 2 5.00% 3 6.67% 4 8.50% 5 10.00% 6 12.00% 7 14.00% 8 16.00% 9 18.00% 10 20.00% 11 21.00% 12 22.00% 13 23.00% 14 24.00% 15 25.00% 16 26.00% 17 27.00% 18 28.00% 19 29.00% 20 30.00% 21 31.00% 22 32.00% 23 33.00% 24 34.00% 25 35.00% 26 36.00% 27 37.00% 28 38.00% 29 39.00% 30 40.00% Bulk orders should be placed directly with us or with Plimus. For more information, please contact sales@daylongraphics.com.   How do I maintain Leveller after installing it? Are updates expensive? Leveller (like most active programs) is periodically updated. There are six types of update: Minor updates, indicated by a minor version number change (e.g., 2.1 to 2.2). These are provided free of charge to users who have licenced the major version. A 1.2 user, for example, can freely upgrade to any other 1.x version, but not to 2.0. Minor updates come with an installer program and do not require updating one's licence code. They are announced on the website and in the newsletter.   Major updates, indicated by a major version number change (e.g., 1.4 to 2.0). These are available by previous version users for a small fee, usually the difference in price between the old and new versions. Major updates come with an installer program and an updated licence code. The update fee is per-licence; we are not obligated to support users who update multiple old licences with a single new licence code. Major updates are actually listed as products in our catalogue and have their own SKU (stock keeping unit) number.   Bug fixes, indicated by a change in either the third or fourth part of the version number. (e.g., 1.4.001 to 1.4.002). These are provided free of charge to users who have licenced the major version. Bug fixes usually affect only the main Leveller executable file and thus are provided as basic ZIP archives. Installation is simply a matter of extracting the archive contents and using them to copy over the existing files of the same name.   Prerelease versions, indicated by the word "alpha" or "beta" after the version number. These are freely available to users who have licenced the major version. For support reasons, they are time-limited, usually to within a month of their build date. Most users do not need or prefer not to risk changes to their existing software, but others who are interested in trying or learning about upcoming features often try beta releases. The update is provided as a basic ZIP archive requiring direct overwrite of existing files. Having both the current and prerelease software on the same PC is easy because Leveller now makes seperate registry entries on a per-version basis.   Test versions, which are usually alpha releases. These are prerelease bug fixes which have been specifically requested by a few users (or even just one) to determine if a particular problem is remedied. They are not mentioned to the general user base (until they graduate to a true fix or other official release) and tend to deal with very obscure issues.   Plug-in updates, which are made available separately on the Plug-ins page. Because plug-ins are small and use no auxilliary files, there is no distinction between installing a new plug-in and updating it; just extract the .LTF file from its ZIP archive and place it into Leveller's plugins folder. If the plug-in includes documentation, there will be instructions in the archive's README file explaining where to place the documentation files.   The frequency of updates is balanced between keeping Leveller up-to-date while also not stressing users into trying to stay up-to-date. Through surveys and some trial and error, we've found that an update frequency of between three months to a year is preferable. If you're not sure if you're up-to-date, simply check the Changes Since Last Time log on the Daylon Leveller home page. Each item and its version number is posted in newest-first order. You can determine the version of Leveller you are using by choosing its Help, About Daylon Leveller... command. Plug-in version information is available under the Help, About Plug-ins... command. We support users and have update packages all the way back to the very first commercial version of Leveller, so don't worry if you feel it's been a long time. If you want to update, or want to find out what updating would entail, just click here. You can leave the software unmodified for as long as you want, and update it at any time.   How do I request an update? Send an email to support@daylongraphics.com. In the message body, provide your name and the email address you used when ordering Leveller. If your email address has changed, your new one will be used to update our customer database. Your licence code may be requested.   I need a custom feature added. Can I do it, or can you or someone else do it? Leveller has an SDK (Software Development Kit) available. It's useful if you don't mind programming, or if you can get a developer friend or hire a developer to program for you. How much work is necessary depends on the customization you have in mind, and of course some customizations are beyond the scope of the SDK (e.g., adding driveable vehicles to the navigation system). Sometimes the solution is easy (e.g., an existing open source plug-in does almost exactly what you want); it's good to refer to the existing material to see what's already been done. We do customization work based on a $60/hr rate. Usually the result is a plug-in -- modifying the Leveller application itself is undesirable as this creates "forks" which become difficult to manage over time. Payments are strictly for us to expedite development as all modifications/plug-ins are released to the general user base. Source code availability depends on contract particulars. Note: We continuously receive ideas for product changes/features. Under no circumstances does the use, adoption, or incorporation of any suggestion or submitted idea constitute a joint venture nor any joint ownership of intellectual property between us and the submitter, even if the implementation's development has been paid for by the submitter, unless otherwise agreed to in writing.   A vendor screwed up my order. Can I bug you about it? No. Not that we're unfeeling or anything, but... If you order Leveller through an intermediary, they are responsible for completing the transaction. They get the software and the licence codes from us, and then it's up to them to sell them. We have absolutely no participation or control over how they run their business and thus are not responsible for their mistakes. All we can do is forward a complaint to them. If you prefer to order directly from us, use your PayPal account or sign up for one with any major credit card. If you don't have a credit card, please click here for more information. As of this writing, Leveller 3.0 is available only directly from Daylon Graphics.   I'm a BS Geoformer user. Am I supported? Yes. BS Geoformer was discontinued in September 2008. Users can upgrade to Daylon Leveller 3.0 for $50 USD. Geoformer documents can be read by Leveller. To arrange switching over to Leveller, please contact support.   I'm a TerrainTek Golf Course Designer user. Am I supported? Yes. TerrainTek Golf Course Designer was effectively discontinued in January 2009. Users with active support agreements can switch over to Daylon Landshaper or to Daylon Landshaper Golf free of charge. GCD documents can be read by both programs. To arrange switching over, please contact support.   My flat-panel/LCD/plasma display flickers. What's going on? Some lower-cost flat-panel displays (or those that are misconfigured) have pixel bleed problems. The display is fine in most cases, but regions showing thin, closely spaced lines tend to smear, moiré, or flicker. In some cases, simply bringing up the Shutdown dialog on Windows 9x will cause the entire screen to flicker badly, because Windows dims the desktop using a dark checker pattern. For Leveller users, these problems appear when rendering wireframe views of heightfields from a distance where the wireframe lines are within one or two device pixels apart. The problem will affect any program displaying similar graphics, such as CAD packages and other 3D modelers. What can you do? If you want to test your display (or one that you are considering purchasing) then view the graphic below on it. If you see anything but alternating black lines, the display needs to be adjusted or is bad. If the display has a fine tune control, try using it while viewing the above graphic. You may find that two different settings will get rid of the flicker, but one will cause smearing. You will still see flickering when the image moves (to try it, enable "Show window contents while dragging" in your Windows display settings, and move the window containing this page around). This is normal because LCD screens typically have lower refresh rates than CRT monitors.   Are there any tutorials available? Yes. Currently, they are: About Heightfields, a page explaining what heightfields are. Heightfield Modeling Basics. More Basics (note: 16MB). Filling Holes. Raytracer Texturing (of maps) Advanced Displacement Mapping with Leveller by ElDiablo. A narrated video tutorial on making racetrack maps for Motocross Madness. Intro to Using Leveller to Model Terrain in ME-DEM, by Carl Lingard (extensive). Making of Beleriand, another ME-DEM Leveller tutorial, by Mauro Nenci (highly detailed). Merging DEMs in Leveller. Creating a Forest Scene with Leveller and POV-Ray. Depthmap Processing. Created Fluted (gently sloped) Shape Edges. Example desert topography. Creating Landscapes with Leveller and POV-Ray by Mick Hazelgrove. A banked road modeling tutorial by Winterkill, a Monster Truck Madness enthusiast. A National MX track creation tutorial for the Motocross Madness game, by betamadness.com. A brief tutorial on making Battlefield 1942 maps, by Mchslong. A short German go-over on some Leveller basics. A nice VRML landscape creation tutorial by Chaicharoen Kunnasit of Australia. A short French review of Leveller by Web3D-fr.   Why don't some plug-ins load? The version of Leveller you are running may be too old; some plug-ins only work with the latest version of Leveller. Also, make sure that you have placed the plug-in file into the correct folder: shader plug-ins must go into the plugins/shaders folder and other plug-ins must go into the plugins folder. Some plug-ins are built with version 6.0 of the Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler and need an appropriate version of MFC42.DLL, e.g. 6.0.8447.0.   Are any Pixar Renderman shaders available for exported RIB files? We've made our Renderman shaders available here. Although they can apply to any object, they are intended to be used on the PatchMesh objects that Leveller generates. While we don't claim that our shaders are perfect, they demonstrate various fundamentals, such as slope-based coloring, etc.   When I start Leveller, I get a message saying "The LEVELLER.EXE file is linked to missing export MFC42.DLL:6453" or under Windows NT 4.0, "Missing ordinal 6453." This message normally appears on older Windows systems that didn't include MFC42.DLL. Applications would install the DLL, but since there were different versions, this sometimes made other applications fail (generally, this problem is known as "DLL Hell"). Modern versions of Windows are a little better at handling this, so simply upgrading to Windows XP or higher should help (or reinstalling Windows if you already have a recent version). Versions of MFC42.DLL known to work include 4.21.7303, 6.0.8447.0, and 6.2.4131.0. You can find which version you have by selecting your copy of MFC42.DLL in an Explorer window. Choose File, Properties, then click the Version tab in the Properties dialog. If you are running applications that need specific versions of the DLL, then you should install those versions into the folders of those applications so that they can use a private local copy while the rest of your applications use the shared DLL in the System folder.   Leveller doesn't run on my system. As a first step, try redownloading whatever package you used to install Leveller and reinstall. If Leveller ran at all, you can examine its ~appinit.log file to see how far it got in its startup process. You can email this file to us to help us investigate the problem. If you downloaded Daylon Fluid and placed it inside the same folder as your Leveller installation and then ran it, Leveller's preference file will get overwritten, preventing proper startup. Delete the file prefs.dat and start Leveller, and move daylon_fluid.exe to its own folder. Most problems tend to be with bad or improperly configured OpenGL drivers. The startup log will usually end at the point where Leveller tried to display its main window. Try running other OpenGL applications to rule out this possibility. Microsoft is supporting NX (No eXecute) memory protection in Windows XP SP2, and AMD/Intel 64-bit processors that have their NX feature enabled will cause Leveller to throw a fatal exception. The offending program code apparently lies in the ATL subsystem used by MFC. As a workaround, you can download this registry update and apply it to your system; it instructs Windows to leave NX disabled when running Leveller.   Is Leveller multithreaded? Yes. In particular, these operations are multithreaded: Invert Replace Rotate Radial Blur Zoomed Blur Select Visible Select Lit Feather Selection Paste Positionally Secondary raytracer The Rotate filter in Leveller 2.5 is multithreaded. Leveller 2.4 and earlier are not multithreaded. The CPU industry is shifting to multiprocessor (e.g., dualcore, quadcore) technology. We try to increase multithreading support to coincide with the availability of these systems.   How many pixels can my heightfields have? A reasonable upper limit is about 6000 x 6000 pixels. Some users have gone up to 9000 x 9000. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of RAM and it helps to have the fastest hardware possible and to delve more into Leveller's render settings. Simply multiplying the heightfield's dimensions by four bytes per pixel won't give you a RAM requirement, because Leveller must maintain Undo buffers, selection masks, normal maps, various caches, etc.   Editing is really choppy, and/or everything is slow. What's going on? First, check your OpenGL driver. You can do this by choosing the Help, Test OpenGL Driver... command from within Leveller. After running the test, you can open the report file in Notepad to see what frame rate was reported. On a 166 Mhz PC with no OpenGL hardware acceleration, the average drawing speed of the default flight rendition style should be around 20 fps for a 64 x 64 heightfield in wireframe mode. If your frame rate is lower, and your PC is 166 Mhz or faster, you may have faulty hardware acceleration (either bad drivers or the card itself). You can determine if this is the case by accessing the Display or System control panel and disabling hardware video acceleration. If your video card is running okay, editing will be sluggish if the editing rendition style has been set to high quality drawing. In Leveller, choose View, Scene Appearence... and click the While Editing tab. Set the general mode to Wireframe and the heightfield sampling rate to be higher than 1 x 1 and/or check Sample distant areas even less. This will give you a high-speed rendering style while editing the heightfield. You can boost it even further (if you don't need to see edits in 3D) by using a Dot Cloud wireframing mode, and/or enabling partial rendering. If you're running Leveller 2.4 or older, and still not getting smooth editing, disable the vertical sync setting of your video card. A screenshot of the nVidia control panel that refers to this option is show below: Because disabled vsync can cause tearing artifacts in some applications, you should set it just for Leveller instead of globally for all programs (if your Display properties panel supports this). I want to draw cool stuff like I see in various galleries. Leveller is primarily a modeler; its renderers are meant more for prototyping. Given the right shader plug-ins, one can produce good effects, but the scenes only contain the heightfield, the water plane, the sky, and the background. To go further, export the heightfield to another program. Some of the images in the Leveller gallery, for example, were generated with the free Persistence of Vision raytracer. A lot of users in the comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing newsgroup can provide resources to make composing final scenes a snap. If you're looking to composite other terrain scene elements with POV-Ray, check out the Genesis Toolkit, or get the POV-Ray FAQ which lists resources such as POV-Ray include files. Matt Fairclough's Terragen is a photorealistic scenery renderer that's perfect if you want a basic, but realistic, terrain scene with minimum fuss. Some Terragen users have gone to great lengths to develop compositing software for external renderers. There's also World Construction Set, Polyray, Rhino, Renderman, Aqsis, etc. Leveller generates BMRT compliant RIB files but BMRT is no longer available. As a replacement, we now focus our RIB compliance efforts on the Aqsis REYES RIB renderer.   I see black areas and/or other display artifacts. Some (usually older) video cards have substandard OpenGL support -- they have firmware bugs or have supported a subset of OpenGL more appropriate for gaming. Please consult your video card vendor for the latest driver/firmware information. Some artifacts are normal, such as Z-buffer "fighting" between objects of equal camera distance (such as the water plane and terrain that happen to be at the same elevation), and thin cracks between different terrain patches rendered at different levels of detail.   I want to make a texture based on what I see in the overhead map view. Leveller can export the overview map to a 24-bit bitmap file, which can then be immediately attached to the heightfield (or used elsewhere).   Can I drape textures over heightfields? Yes. Use the View, Texture... command, or drag a picture file and drop it onto the 3D scene pane. Textures can be offset, scaled, rotated, and tiled, or auto-placed if they and your heightfield are georeferenced. The texture can be blended with the underlying colormap. The water level's finite plane can also be textured. The legacy raytracer's imagemap shader supports custom blending of as many textures as you want, although they cannot be transformed. Texture data is exported (as much as possible) to POV-Ray, RIB/BMRT, VRML and Polyray. Alpha channels are supported, and textures are bilinearly filtered. The raytracer's bumpmap shader supports bumpmap textures. Hi-res textures can be supersampled by the raytracer. If a texture bitmap does not have color data, its data bands can be mapped to color channels to visualize temperatures, gravimetrics, etc. Renderer plug-ins have full access to texture data and texture transforms.   Can I place 3D objects onto my heightfields? Yes. However, Leveller only understands its own simple shape list (.LSL) format. Use the View, Reference Shapes, Attach... command. The feature is intended to preview simple object placement instead of provide general-purpose modeling. LSL files can be edited with a text editor (or generated by applications like our GridMaker utility and sPatch plug-in), but Leveller does not have any shape editing facilities itself, so the file must be reattached after modifying it. LSL format supports lines, triangles, rects, and boxes. Because boxes can have each face independantly textured, they can be used to visualize simple buildings. Camera-facing rects can emulate billboards and can also be made to adjust altitude relative to the heightfield. Externally modified textures are automatically reloaded on textured objects when Leveller is activated.   Can I use a graphics tablet or a Tablet PC with Leveller? Yes. Leveller supports any digitizing device that supports the WinTab standard (e.g., Wacom Intuos). If your TabletPC is not recognized as a tablet device, but uses a Wacom digitizer, you can try installing the Wacom Pen driver for TabletPC. This will make your TabletPC offer WinTab interfaces to applications and also forwards pressure sensitivity data. Leveller supports stylus eraser and pressure sensitivity. Stylus tilt is not used but the data is forwarded to tool plug-ins.   Can I use shapefiles? Leveller 3.0 supports loading of DXF polyline files, ESRI shapefiles, and Adobe Illustrator files into its vector shapes layer. It also exports vector shapes to DXF, Illustrator, and to SVG. Leveller's LSL format has a polyline primitive. This means that you can import an ESRI shapefile using Daylon Vectre and export it to an LSL file that Leveller can use. Vectre's LSL export is simple; the shapefile data appears as wireframe lines in Leveller.   Which programs can exchange clipboard data with Leveller? Daylon Life, Daylon XaoS, and World Machine can copy heightfields which can then be pasted into Leveller. The VTBuilder application of the Virtual Terrain Project suite is testing copy/paste with the georeferencing enhancements to the clipboard format which is available in Leveller 2.6.   Why do exported images look weird? You've exported the heightfield file using more than eight bits per pixel to a bitmap format such as BMP or TGA. Since the document is a heightfield, Leveller assumes that you want to export elevation data. The pixels, when interpreted as colors, look like the picture on the right: This is normal. Leveller uses POV-Ray's red/green color channel interpretation to store elevations, since there is no standard grayscale format for pixel depths over eight bits per pixel. If you're in a hurry and just want to get a traditional 8-bpp grayscale image, extract the image's red channel. If you want to export how the displayed heightfield looks on the screen (i.e., the picture on the left) use the "Map to Bitmap" or "Scene to Bitmap" export commands.   My Second Life terrain has artifacts when running the SL viewer. This is a known problem both with Second Life's terrain and sculptie primitives. One makes a clean model, uploads it to their sim's server for actual use, and then finds small, seemingly random vertex displacements here and there. What's happening is that Second Life uses a lossy compression format similar to JPEG to encode terrain. Linden Labs does this to conserve bandwidth. They have known about the problem for a long time but are not keen on fixing it because (a) it would reduce streaming performance, especially for low-bandwidth users, and (b) the problem is less significant with typical, gently sloping terrain, and therefore isn't considered serious. Is there a mailing list available to discuss Leveller? You can join the Leveller mailing list (moderated) by clicking here. You can unsubscribe from it by clicking here. The list is hosted by FreeLists.org. The old list hosted by YahooGroups is no longer used. Messages posted to the list will be sent to your e-mail address. To keep them from cluttering your inbox, we suggest setting up a separate folder, and adding a filter that directs the messages to it. If you're using Outlook Express, you can do this by choosing File, Folder, New Folder... to create the folder, and then Tools, Inbox Assistant... to add the filter. The filter should look for subject lines containing the text "[leveller]".   Can I use pictures from this site? Yes, if you include an "Image courtesy of Daylon Graphics" caption next to it. If you want to use one of our pictures on the Web, direct linking should be avoided since it uses our server's bandwidth. When that happens, we usually rename our picture files so that the links break. For example, every now and then someone inserts something like <img src="http://www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/gallery/picture.jpg"> into the HTML code of their webpage, when what they should do is copy the picture file onto their server and use a local reference like <img src="picture.jpg"> Not only is that more efficient, but the web page will be immune to any changes on our site involving the picture. If you're new to the Web, and are just grabbing images from our site and dropping them into your Web pages, your publishing software may accidentally generate direct links. If so, modify its picture reference settings or manually copy the picture file to your own computer before using it.

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Daylon Leveller is powered in part by the OpenGL^® API.