I'm working on a world for which I imported a height map and I noticed in working on it I keep running into a graphical issue where water comes in contact with land. When I'm zoomed in everything looks fine, but when I zoom out it's like the water disappears and shows what may possibly be under the water.

The pictures I have currently are taken at the edge of the map, but last night I was working in the middle of the map (I since threw that one out) and it was doing the same thing there. Here are a couple of pictures:




Do you see the land sticking out from the area that's poking out into the water? That's what I'm talking about. For some reason I can't make it go away. I was hoping it was just an issue in C-A-W but I loaded my map last night into Edit In Game mode, zoomed out, and it had the same problem.

I too used an imported heightmap and I found I needed to modify it so that the contrast between land and water was a bit higher and then I lightly smoothened the edge for beaches and kept the harsh drop off for cliffs. The graphical issues do still arise when zoomed out, but I believe that is just a display issue.

Thank you for replying, Riv! Yes, using imported height maps is causing a few odd things graphically, for sure. I have another world that I started with a completely finished height map as well (my first and foremost project I started with a height map, but only enough to follow a real river route and road lay-out and haven't seen any strange things with it at all) and it doesn't have the issues the other one does. After playing around with both of those worlds for a while I think I may be onto something.

The first world with the problems has very tall spikes in it. I am pretty sure at this point it's a wireframe issue, and the uber tall spikes are causing me a lot of grief. I think the best analogy would be to think of the wireframe as just that, a frame made of wires. The tall spikes seem to be pulling the world mesh up around them slightly. I tried making them shorter (took the map back into PSP and fiddled around with the contrast to darken the spikes and make them shorter, then darkened the whole image so that the base was fairly close to what it was originally) and it has improved the situation, but hasn't fixed it all together.

If that explanation isn't enough, think of taking a piece of chicken wire and laying it down flat, then pulling up sections of the wire. Eventually the sections pulled up are going to reach the point where the adjacent sections can't help but yield to the pull and rise as well. Zoomed in it may not be all that noticeable, but zooming out re-sizes the wireframe and ultimately reshapes it slightly to fit the zoom.

In shaping a flatter world I've always noticed a bit of pull when I have the smooth or flatten tool in use, in that the surface will look like one thing while the tool is attached, but once I turn it loose will shape itself slightly different. On a flatter world, it doesn't spring back much. In my world with the really high mountains it's practically impossible to terraform near the spikes because the spikes are pulling the wireframe back up.

So, there's my long-winded and rambly explanation of what I think is going on. I'll have to take this map back into PSP and see if I can lower my spikes even more. It is such a cool height map and I have such plans for it I can't let it go to waste!

I think you summed that up about right. But what you can do is use the smoothen tool on these extreme points. Smoothen kind of straightens out the mesh (take a look at the wireframe view to see what i mean) and pretty much removes those ugly edges. In fact I pretty much reworked my entire map with the smoothing tool and then went in with the mountain/flaten tool to get some crisp edges on the rock surfaces. For the oceans it is very important to not use a smooth transition on the height map but a hard edge as you can see in the height map I have attached above. This way all the ugly edges will be either underwater or smoothened for beaches any ways, giving you a nice waterline around your cliffs.

Yes, too much smoothing on those rocks is bad. I had smoothed this one down quite a bit to see if it would help with the graphical problem. I'll have to mess around with the tops of the spires to see just what I can do.

Right now I'm wanting to just pull out my hair. I keep running into brick wall after brick wall with what I'm trying to do. It would probably help if I wasn't insisting on going for the most awesome things I can think of doing. It's no wonder there are so stinking many less than mediocre worlds available. Most people just give up and throw something together. Some really nice ones are starting to come out. The creators have built some lovely things, but they didn't push the envelope on any of them. Ah well, eventually I'll get figured out just how far things can be pushed.

well I'm certainly interested in hat you can come up with. I think I've gotten a handle on how to work the heightmaps and turn out a cool looking world,...but the decorating is a pain. Placing EVERYTHING seperately by hand realy takes for ever.