So, I think I can speak for most map makers when I say that making terrains is difficult. Trying to get the ratio of mountains, lakes, and valley right when you can't see it in real time is horrid. Not only that, but if you make a terrain and decide in-game to make the height very high or fairly wide, it tends to get VERY BUMPY. Which annoys me to no end and looks kinda crappy because it means your original .png isn't ready to be stretched like that. And don't get me started on making masks to match the terrain that you can't EXACTLY see where you want your mountain texture, or anything like it, to start when switching between GIMP and FH -_-
If any of you search the OGRE wiki or website, you'll see plenty of links to terrain makers, mesh viewers, free texture websites, and more, because the creators of the OGRE platform wanted it to be VERY accessible and easy for all to make games that run with OGRE, or in our case, make stuff that run
in games that run with OGRE. There are lots of links to terrain makers and such, let me tell ya. Some of them are outdated, their domains are free now, or they just don't work. I have found several that do, including using programs like GIMP or photoshop or whathaveyou to make the .png in 2D.
But to solve the above problems that occur when you use image editing software to make terrains, you want a 3D terrain editor that textures simultaneously, as well as stretch the width/length (in FH, you can only do squares, so your width and length have to be the same) and the height properly, Artifex Terra is a life saver! Yes, L3DT is nice, because you can change all sorts of real-life-y sliders (how often do you want valleys to form? is it a temperate climate? lots of lakes? cliffs? etc) to get a picture that translate to a 3D model that you can edit and then export as a .png. But, it is not set to OGRE stuff (parameters. it has no idea that you will be stretching the .png in FH to make a REALLY WIDE map, for example), so if you want the map to be hella high (lots of height differences) it will be bumpy.
Thus, I present to you Artifex Terra. I myself am still experimenting with it, but I like it so far. Technically it is a scene editor/creators/exporter, which means you can add meshes, lights, the terrain, and all sorts of other things to export so an OGRE game can run it, but FH doesn't run scenes. BUT, if you get rid of all the meshes and stuff, and leave yourself with just the terrain, you can set the width and length to different numbers (separately, which is unfortunate because like I said, in FH the terrain HAS to be square, not rectangular.) as well as change the height. Once you do this, you can edit the terrain 3 dimensionally, which is beautiful. You can raise and lower land as well as texture it with a different tool.
Now, I haven't figured out exactly how to make the mask, but when you save your scene, the terrain.png is created as well as a 'minimap' which shows exactly where what textures are, but it isn't in red, green, and blue. It's in the ACTUAL textures you textured the terrain with. But, I would assume that you could convert it to FH's terrain masks by selecting one type of texture and changing it to red, another and changing it to blue, and another and changing it to green. The only struggle about the whole thing is that you still have to change the .png sizes, because their default is either 1025 (the terrain) or 2048 (the 'minimap' or impromptu mask)(or 513. whatever FH runs maps with these days lawl)
Opp also in the manual it says "To get to the texture studio, press [Ctrl+Enter] and select it from the central menu. Here you can adjust the RGB values of each texture as well as brightness and contrast. Future plans are to implement real texture painting/editing, filters like in common paint applications." So you could prob choose one texture, change it to bright red, and paint away. And then do that with green and blue...? Well, it would just be bright red grass. But when you open it in GIMP or w/e, you could just select that color anyway. It could still work!
The link to the website is
here and the download is in the mid-right, in the box that says "Artifex Terra 1.2 PE beta, ZIP, ~ 177 MB Click 1,2,3,5 and 8 to download." You have to click on the corresponding bubbles [1,2,3,5 and 8] so it knows you're a real human trying to download it.
Idk I just think it has the possibility to be a really great resources for map makers.
