The Leveller heightfield modeler has been updated to version 4.0.

Changes:

- Elevation labels. A new tool lets you plot elevation labels along any
number of arbitrary paths. The labels appear next to contour lines and
automatically drop out to avoid overcrowding when the display is zoomed out.

- Contour lines. These are drawn on top of the colormap at a
user-defined spacing. There's also a command to generate elevated vector 
shapes from contour lines.

- Cross section analysis. Select a vector shape, request a cross
section, and it appears in a resizable window with a moveable point for
analysis of slope and other attributes. Will also show cut/fill and
comparative data if a reference heightfield is loaded.

- Cut/fill analysis. Given a reference heightfield (see below), you can
see negative and positive elevation differences between it and the
loaded heightfield. You can also compute volumes. Cut/fill is normally
used by landsite designers to compare their changes against the original
terrain, and also to minimize soil movement (and shipping soil in or out
from the site) by making all the raised areas (fills) get their dirt
from the dug areas (cuts).

- Reference heightfield. Normally used to drive the cut/fill system, but
with the Restoration tool, lets you revert modeling changes by brushing 
or within a selected area.

- Textures within shapes. Instead of just colors for shape fills and
strokes, you can apply textures such as bump noise, imagemaps, specular
gloss and reflection. Shader effects can be layered into custom
textures. Using imagemaps lets you place any number of image textures
anywhere, instead of having just one drape texture.

- Shape feathering. Vector shape content can be feathered to smoothly
transition onto the underlying heightfield or against other shapes.

- 3D objects. Unlike billboard reference shapes, these cast shadows
better and look proper when viewed from above. They also take more
memory, but RAM is cheap and plentiful these days. The only limit is the
32-bit address space, which hopefully will be worked around next year.
Only built-in object types are available, but there's enough to do good
basic scenes, and there will be more as time goes on. Shapes can be
filled and stroked with objects, and the distribution pattern and object
size/angle is user-definable. A special type of marker is used to place
individual objects (i.e., a filled point instead of a filled shape). The 
raytracer has culling options to reduce memory usage. Example renders 
available at
www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller/gallery



Ray Gardener
Daylon Graphics Ltd.
www.daylongraphics.com/products/leveller

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