jMonkeyEngine 3.0 Beginner's Guide

Time for action – splat goes the texture

You see how easy it is to create and texture a terrain in the SDK—but you can of course achieve the same with hand-drawn textures and hand-written Java code.

First, we create a heightmap for our terrain by performing the following steps:

1. Create a grayscale PNG image in a graphic editor of your choice. The size must be a square power of two; for example, 512 px x 512 px.
2. Use a spray or brush tool to outline the terrain's elevation in grayscales, where white represents high and black low.
3. Save the heightmap as assets/Textures/Terrain/heightmap.png.

Next, we draw the alphamap that specifies where the grass, rock, and road textures go.

1. Create an empty 32-bit RGBA color image. The size must be a square power of two; ...