A few individuals have recently posted tutorials using TerreSculptor and Epic's UDK onto the Internet. It is apparent that no time was spent reading the comprehensive reference manual that is included with the software, as the tutorials are filled with many errors and a lot of misinformation.
Here are a few guidelines for those who have not yet read the reference manual.
Before using TerreSculptor for a specific project be sure to set the appropriate options, especially the Units Preset for the target video game engine since this matches the TerreSculptor viewport rendering to the target engine. When TerreSculptor is correctly set up its viewport terrain rendering will correctly match the target video game engine or 3D application, so what you see in TerreSculptor is the same as what you see in the video game engine.
See Reference Manual chapter: Initial Application Settings
See Reference Manual chapter: Options
The File menu Open and Save items are for opening and saving TerreSculptor World Stack files, these are "Stack Mode" functions which will be available soon. File Open and Save are not used for opening and saving of heightmaps in "Immediate Mode", the File menu Import and Export items are used for this.
See Reference Manual chapter: Immediate Mode versus Stack Mode
See Reference Manual chapter: The Menu bar
See Reference Manual chapter: most of the tutorials
The Noise Generator and other similar processor-intensive dialogs include a Preview button and a Real-time Preview toggle button which is typically on a toolbar. When attempting to rapidly move sliders with Real-time Preview on, the display will attempt to keep up with the sliders. Keep an eye on the progress meter bar under the Preview button and if the preview is constantly busy, either wait for it to finish or turn off the Real-time Preview or reduce the Preview Resolution on the Options Preferences tab.
See Reference Manual chapter: Options Preferences tab
When exporting a Heightmap for general use or for a video game engine such as UDK, always save it to a 16-bit format such as G16 (preferable), RAW-16, Terragen, TGA or TIF 16-bit Grayscale. UDK requires .r16 RAW-16 format. Never save it to an 8-bit format such as Windows Bitmap, as this will almost always result in severe data loss (you are saving a 16-bit heightmap to an 8-bit format). Exporting to 8-bit formats is typically only used when the Heightmap is being used for image or print and it is required to be in a compatible format such as BMP, GIF, PNG, etc.
See Reference Manual chapter: Terrain Design
See Reference Manual chapter: Creating Heightmaps for Unreal Engine 3 UDK
See Reference Manual chapter: Exporting a Heightmap for UDK Landscape
Properly created Heightmaps are almost always centered on the Y axis with a portion of the altitude on each of the positive and negative sides. In most cases you do not want to move the terrain completely to the positive side using the Altitude GeoTool. The total altitude range is typically around 10,000 to 40,000 heightmap sample values. When exporting heightmaps for use with engines such as UDK be sure to use the same RAW-16 PC Unsigned format for both the TerreSculptor and UDK dialogs, do not use the UDK Signed format as that format appears to be broken in UDK, and do not mix the pc and mac or signed and unsigned formats otherwise the resulting terrain data will be incorrect and full of spikes or other anomalies.
See Reference Manual chapter: Terrain Design
See Reference Manual chapter: Creating Heightmaps for Unreal Engine 3 UDK
See Reference Manual chapter: Exporting a Heightmap for UDK Landscape
The reference manual contains numerous tutorials, plus comprehensive video tutorials are coming soon. Until then it is always benefitial to read the reference manual which is constantly updated with new information, and do not assume that other parties are providing correct information on how to use the sofware.
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