Leveller 4.0 is now available. The new features come from Landshaper, which has been discontinued (but Landshaper Golf is still available). Details: - 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 auser-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, butwith 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 placeindividual objects (i.e., a filled point instead of a filled shape). The raytracer has culling options to reduce memory usage.
- The old raytracer was dropped. I don't think anyone will miss it. - If the 4.0 installer detects a 3.x installation, it will offer to copy its user data over (preferences, etc.).Trivia: December 3rd is also the day (in 1998) when Leveller 1.0 was released. Happy 12th birthday. :)
Ray