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Mask Assets

Mask assets are used on children of zones to control growth, for things such as world building.

Mask Asset Common Properties

Each of the asset bars have a common group at the top. View this page to read about the common asset groups.

Masks are assigned in the “Generation” group of every generator. Masks can be stacked on top of each other, allowing for both simple and complex rule sets governing the placement of nodes off of a generator's parent.

Behavior

  • Inclusive: This mask will determine where growth is allowed.
  • Exclusive: This mask will determine where growth is not allowed.

Type

The type of mask can be set to Image, Terrain, or TexCoord.

Fuzziness

“Fuzziness” relaxes the results of masking. Any value over about 0.5 will make the mask barely noticeable.

"Adapt to masks"

When Adapt to masks is enabled on a zone generator, any children with masks applied will be forced into the confines of the mask, rather than failing nodes simply being removed.

Image Masks

Image masks are grayscale images (or a single channel from a color image) used to mask growth off of zones. While the mask itself is applied to the children of the zone, the mask is mapped according to the texture coordinates of the parent zone.

Filename

The image file on disk used as the mask. Use the browse and reload options to change or update the image mask.

Channel

The channel source of the image mask. This can be set to “grayscale” (averages all channels), red, green, blue, or alpha.

Layer

The set of texture coordinates used when applying the image mask to the parent zone.

Base
Use the “main” set of texture coordinates, which correspond with the diffuse texture layer.

Detail
Use the “detail” set of texture coordinates, which correspond with the detail texture layer. Note: not all zones have detail texture coordinates. Detail texture coordinates are only available with imported meshes in either 'FBX' or 'STM' format ('OBJ' does not support multiple sets of texture coordinates).

Texture Preview

The texture preview window provides a way to view the image mask as it will be used. The texture preview scales to the dimensions of the mask asset bar.

Navigating the preview window
The mask preview can be zoomed by scrolling with the middle mouse button, or by click-dragging both the left and middle mouse buttons at the same time. The preview can be panned by dragging the left mouse button, if the image is zoomed in past 100%. Double-clicking in the window will zoom the extents of the image. If the image is not square, double-clicking again will zoom the shorter of the two dimensions.


Terrain Masks

Set a range for min and max elevation ('Z' height) or slope (face angle). This type of mask could be used to push conifers up higher on a mountain or to keep wide trees off of steeper slopes.

Slope

The angle range allowing growth. A value of “1.0” points up, and a value of “0.0” points down. A value of “0.5” points horizontal to the ground plane.

Relative Elevation

The percentage range of the height of the parent zone where growth is allowed. “1.0” equals the top of the parent zone while “0.0” equals the bottom of the parent zone.

Absolute Elevation

An absolute elevation range in scene units.

NOTE: if your parent zone is not tall enough to fall in this range, no nodes will survive the mask.



TexCoord Masks

Generation can be limit to a subset of texture coordinates on the parent node. For instance if your source object has texture coordinates greater than 1.0, you could only allow growth from areas of the mesh with texture coordinates in this range.

U and V

The minimum and maximum texture coordinate range of the parent zone allowing growth.

Layer

The set of texture coordinates used when applying the image mask to the parent zone.

  • Base: Use the “main” set of texture coordinates, which correspond with the diffuse texture layer.
  • Detail: Use the “detail” set of texture coordinates, which correspond with the detail texture layer.
Note: not all zones have detail texture coordinates. Detail texture coordinates are only available with imported meshes in either 'FBX' or 'STM' format ('OBJ' does not support multiple sets of texture coordinates).