Here I go again. Another post of useless information. For those of you fool hardy enough to read through this mess, I wanted to share a few things I have discovered with you. I am not claiming that this is a tool of any great value, just information. I know there are some on this forum that already are aware of all of this. They have chosen not to share it with the rest of us, or perhaps they have and I just missed it. That often happens with my pea brain. In that case, just ignore this and move on. All of my assumptions are probably not correct, but I’ll throw them out there to maybe give you something to think about.
Anyway, I was just messing around in the tiles folder for my white void experimental route and the idea hit me that Photoshop had an option in the file menu to open files with the .raw extension. I knew that the .t and the y.raw files contained all the terrain elevation information, so I took a chance and opened a y.raw tile file with Photoshop. After experimenting a little bit I learned the following: the y.raw tile file consists of a 256 x 256 pixel grid of 16 bit grayscale values. Actually it appears that this is a numerical value corresponding to the elevation data that just happens to be a grayscale picture when viewed graphically. Looks just like the grayscale mode of Microdem when you look at a tile that has had DEM data applied to it! In the editor, when you set a maximum and minimum elevation, you see it calculate a scale factor. When you multiply that scale factor against the value of a pixel in the y.raw file you get the actual value of the height of that point of terrain. So in Photoshop, maximum white corresponds to maximum height, and black corresponds to minimum height. Shades of gray in between are steps of elevation. You can use the Photoshop tools and color selection to “draw” new height information.
Some of the problems with using this as a useful tool are: Knowing which tile you need to edit. After the editing you must select the tile in RE and change the max-min height and save to get the change to register correctly, just like in the first versions of dealing with demex.
One potential use of this could be to “draw” stream beds with the pencil tool instead of using track sections within the Route Editor. As it said, the hardest part is figuring out which tiles to edit. Studying the tile names in the RGE gives a clue to the way they are named and is a place to start. Demex also provides the name of the tile your cursor is over. In Photoshop, the top of the tile is North.
If you want to give this a try, select and open a tile that ends with y.raw with Photoshop. It will attempt to guess the format of the graphic. You may need to help it the first time by making sure that the size is 256 by 256, Channel count is set to 1, Depth is set to 16 bits, Byte order is set to IBM PC, and 0 header bytes. I am using Photoshop 6.0 and I don’t recommend that you use your favorite route to play around with.
The following are some photos showing the results of playing with a single tile in Photoshop.
Larry
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Editing Terrain with Photoshop [View All], lfriddle, 00:50 AM, Feb-01-03, (0) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, Coonskin, Feb-01-03, 03:39 AM, (1) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, MarkMyers, Feb-01-03, 05:26 AM, (2) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, JohnCS, Feb-01-03, 07:09 AM, (3) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, landnrailroader, Feb-01-03, 09:31 AM, (4) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, dispatcher618, Feb-02-03, 02:09 AM, (6) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, lfriddle, Feb-01-03, 12:53 PM, (5) RE: Editing Terrain with Photoshop, rpicardi1, Feb-02-03, 08:57 AM, (7)
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