Daylon Leveller is a professional modeling solution for terrain, heightfields, bumpmaps, and other surface geometries. Below are some details on how Leveller can help you. General Stuff Editing Filters Viewing and Navigation Vector Shapes Import/Export Screenshots   Below are some images created with Leveller, either by itself or in concert with other programs (click to enlarge):             No document surface area size limit; practical upper limit is estimated at approximately 36 megapixels (e.g., 6,000 x 6,000). Number of open documents, Undo items, views, and textures limited only by memory. Multiple filters available, with more as plug-ins. OpenGL, raytracing and scanlining renderers included. Water level and heightfield texturemapping available. Map heightfield onto distorted plane to perform, e.g., vertical exaggeration. Map heightfield onto non-planar shapes such as sphere, cone, cylinder, sphere section, etc. Auto-define sphere section mappings from coordinate system. Drag and drop available for texture bitmaps, documents, and selection masks. Flight animations can be prototyped and exported to POV-Ray, Terragen, or as a series of numbered bitmap images. Can save and work with multiple scene configurations independantly of the heightfield. Macros can automate invocation of simple command sequences. Heightfield grids can have raster, local, or geographic coordinate systems. Elevation units can differ from ground units. Gridpost spacing need not be square. Interruptible rendering. Customizable color schemes for both 3D and 2D views. Can import reference shapes to easily match heightfield edits with other objects in the final 3D scene. Box reference shapes can be textured for simple building visualization. Preferred directories can be defined and named, which can then be quickly navigated to in File Open/Save dialogs. Markers to identify and annotate locations of interest, and to navigate to them easily.   Leveller works with heightfields in much the same way that a painting program works with bitmaps, by letting you alter its surface with various tools. Instead of painting, one digs, raises, smooths, roughens, or otherwise sculpts the heightfield. Use editing tools on both 2D and 3D viewpanes. True multiple Undo/Redo of most document elements including heightfield, selection mask, and markers. Regress to any edit in one jump. Floating tool status panel allows quick access to tool settings. Toggle quickly between Zoom, Pan, and the most recently used other tool. Zoom in and out anytime by pressing Alt+Numpad Plus/Minus. Full cut/copy/paste - exchange all or part of a heightfield with others. Global elevations panel - similar to foreground/background colors in painting programs. Pasted selections can be merged by replacing, adding, subtracting, unioning, etc. Pad command - lets heightfield be padded with extra pixels without modifying existing geometry. Eyedropper tool - set current elevation swatches to clicked heightfield pixel. Dig/Raise tools - excavate terrain or heap material onto it. Flatten tool - quickly set areas to the same height, smoothly or roughly. Crater tool - bombard the terrain from above. Text tool - create a floating selection from the glyphs of any font, style, and point size. Blur/Sharpen tool - selectively smooth or sharpen areas. Rubber Stamp (Clone) tool - selectively duplicate areas by brushing. Any view or document window can be used as the pixel source. Ramp tool - easily create elevation ramps in linear or radial style, with smooth, sharp, convex or concave sloping. Line, rectangle, and ellipse tools - quickly dig or raise simple shapes. True realtime 3D editing feedback in left side of view window. Variable brush sizes to limit tool effects. Pressure-related brushsizing when using graphic tablets. Round, sharp, and flat brush shapes available. Brush-based tools can have their effects limited to yet-unbrushed areas to easily avoid overdigging, oversmoothing, etc. Selection tools - select areas rectangularly, elliptically, arbitrarily, or by elevation tolerance with the Magic Wand tool. Show selection mask by itself to precisely see selection opacities. Drag selected areas to instantly clone them. Selections can be extended or subtracted by using the Shift and Ctrl keys with any of the selection tools. Selections can be inverted, feathered, and arbitrarily opaqued. Selections can be shrunk, padded, grown, and stroked. All heightfield points within a specified elevation range can be selected at once. All heightfield points within a specified slope range can be selected at once (via plug-in). Floating selections can be merged into the heightfield by replacing, adding, subtracting, unioning, etc. Selection marquee can be shown/hidden in shaded 3D views. Selection marquees (masks) can be saved/loaded to/from disk. Select visible pixels and lit pixels. Low-contrast selection masks can be equalized. Status bar shows current ground position and elevation, and marquee position/size data as a selection is being made. 3D cursor and brush reticle show where in the 3D scene your changes will occur. Optional elevation readout tooltip shadows the cursor.   In addition to tools, filters let you quickly produce a wide range of useful effects.                Clip - truncate the heightfield to preferred low/high elevations. Combine - merge two heightfields into one. Elevate - raise or lower terrain by a specific amount. Easier than using the Span filter. Flip - flip the heightfield horizontally or vertically. Gaussian Blur - quickly blur using any kernel radius. Interpolate - average two heightfields using a definable midpoint. Invert - turn the heightfield upside-down. Motion Blur - stretch the heightfield along any line. Radial Blur - stretch the heightfield around any point. Rotate - rotate the heightfield to any angle. Multithreaded. Scale - stretch the heightfield vertically and/or horizontally. Sharpen - sharpen the heightfield to create a crisper look. Slide - move/offset part of the heightfield along the groundplane. Smooth - smooth the heightfield to create a softer, eroded look. Span - make the heightfield span a specific range of elevations. Terrace - equalize similar elevations to create a terraced look. Zoom Blur - blur from a point outwards or inwards. Other filters included as plug-ins: gforge, Erode, Craters, Pattern, Deterrace, Cracks, Mosaic, etc.   To show exactly what's going on, Leveller includes a live 3D view next to the editing area: You can spin and orient the 3D view of the heightfield with the mouse, or by clicking on the map view with the Camera tool, or fly around the heightfield using the keyboard. If the frame rate is too slow, you can speed it up using various display options.    Other items: Arrange viewpanes side-by-side or one on top of the other. 3D scene can be viewed from any position and direction. Overview map camera tool - set the scene viewpoint anywhere and aim it. User-definable partial rendering to speed up drawing of 3D views. 3D view can appear as a point cloud, X/Z-only lines, full wireframe, flat shaded or smooth shaded, with options for sampling density, fog, field of view, back clipping plane, etc. Overview map can have simulated relief shading applied, and can optionally show texture and water plane. Positionable light source with three dot-product lighting modes and optional shadows. Imagemap textures can be applied as-is or blended with the elevation colormap. Imagemap textures can be arbitrarily scaled, rotated, and/or tiled, and auto-placed if georeferenced. Water level plane can be viewed in 3D with optional bitmap texture. Camera position, line of sight and field of view appear on overhead map. Keyboard navigation based on intuitive video game controls. 3D navigation keys can be user-defined. Flight speed and flight viewing are customizable. Keyboard can be used to pan overview map and move selection marquee. Automatic distance-based LOD reduction supported for viewing large heightfields. Marker creation and placement, with waypoint navigation. Whole map navigation window. Camera can be kept a definable minimum altitude above ground. Raytracing renderer included, supports animation, soft shadows, disk rendering, orthographic projection, and shader plug-ins. User-definable colormap lookup table precision; colors gentle slopes more accurately. Optional high-resolution map pane rendering, either auto or on-demand.   You can markup the heightfield with polyline and Bezier spline shapes, as a visualization aid or modeling assist. Tools similar to Adobe Illustrator for easy learning. Extract heightfield selection mask from selected shapes. Assign fill color/opacity, stroke color/opacity, and stroke width to selected shapes. Assign optional elevation to selected shapes. Extract convex hull from selected shapes (e.g., contour line rasterization). Extract heightfield formations from selected shapes. Import vector shapes from Illustrator and through GDAL (DXF, ESRI, TIGER/LINE, etc.). Export vector shapes to Illustrator, DXF, and SVG. Cut, join, and align shape points. Paste in front/back, send shapes forward/backward or to the front/back. Annotate shapes with optional names and text notes. Tesselate, simplify, and insert points into selected shapes. Use shapes to create smooth flyover animation camera flight and look-at paths. View shapes in high resolution when raytracing.   This table lists all the file formats with which Leveller can exchange heightfield and image data. Clipboard support includes: Copy heightfield using public tabbed text or binary formats. Copy map or 3D scene image as 24-bit bitmap. Copy entire map or just the visible part. Copy selection mask as grayscale bitmap. Copy camera as text to RIB, POV-Ray, Polyray, or to VRML format. Paste heightfield as new document or as a floating selection. Positional pasting when georeferencing included.   Other data exchanges: Export 2D map or 3D scene image. Import/export textures, including those with alpha channels. Non-color bitmaps can be imported as images and masks with user-defined channel mapping. Option to auto-place imported georeferenced textures. Export georeferenced textures if heightfield has coordinate system. Export heightfield and scene viewpoint/water level/texture/colormap/fog to POV-Ray(tm) as a heightfield or as a triangle mesh object. DXF and OBJ exports supported selected-points-only option. Export distorted heightfields as meshes to POV-Ray, Renderman, VRML, DXF and OBJ. Export points within selected area to POV-Ray (for doing tree coverage, etc.). Selection masks can be imported and exported as grayscale images. Import vector shapes from Illustrator and through GDAL (DXF, ESRI, TIGER/LINE, etc.). Export vector shapes to Illustrator, DXF, and SVG.

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