How to make LARGE terrain+texture in Maya and export ?

cmtanko

-Hope I can explain it properly as I don't know some terms.

Requirements:
Need to make a BIG terrain model in Maya and texture it similar to that of UDK or CryEngine.
ie. 1 Big texture(what you call that ? Color Map ?)+ 4-5 different detailed tiling texture and similarly 1 Big Normal Map + 4-5 detailed tiling Normal Map ?

Question:
I know it involves using 2 UV maps and putting 1 in each (something like that), But really don't know how to ?

Can I paint detail tiled texture in Maya(or any other software maybe) as we can do in UDK ?
How to export that to a engine if we make like that ?

Hope that makes sense, I have gone through Poly wiki many time and still have the problem. Could you guys help me refer to some tutorial link regarding the same or make a small one for me plz (Never understood that thing ever).




Like these guys,

Like these guys,
{[UDK] Helms Deep & Fort HornBurg}
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74720

{The Last of Us Art dump / Rogelio Olguin}
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=122359&page=2

kodde

You could have a look at World Machine or maybe L3DT.

cmtanko

No, World Machine/ZBrush I will use for making Color Map/Normal maps + High Poly+Low Poly.. But what I'm asking is after that process, you need to texture the Low poly terrain.

Fwap

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3lVs-7JBn0"]How to create a terrain for Cryengine and UDK Part 3/8 - YouTube[/ame]

Choco's stuff is good, if you are using UDK or CE3 he's got videos on that.
A different engine might be a bit more difficult but you should be able to get the jist of it after those videos.

cmtanko

thanks Fwap, Yes, that video series of Choco is simply awesome. That's were I learned abt the world map and how to use it. that's where the question arises actually.

After making Colormap and other from WorldMap, If we use UDK or CryEngine, the next process is clear.
But I want to use it in Maya and paint detail texture(as we cannot paint texture in Maya) I'm confused how to do it.

cmtanko

Okay here is the thing: I made this and rendered in Marmoset.
It already has a texture and normal map. Now how can I add tiling grass,rocks,ground texture on top on it ?

kodde

Well I just tried creating a lambert material with 4 blend color nodes, 5 tiling terrain textures and one RGBA blend texture. Hoping that I could see this in the viewport and then use the 3D Paint Tool to paint the blend texture. Had to use HQ viewport render to get a decent view of the shader. Although all this worked the paint process took forever once you made on stroke to process it and finally show it to you. Not fun at all.

Using a CGFX solution won't work with the 3D paint too as it doesn't recognize the attributes to paint to.

Maybe some custom setup where you switch from a mask-view which just shows flat RGB coloring and a shelf button or similar to preview with terrain textures? Another hack is to use for instance a CGFX shader, clone your object and make it slightly smaller, let this smaller object use a native maya shader (lambert for instance), paint to a texture which also feeds to the CGFX shader. Not a pretty solution but it works fairly alright.

Another idea might be to use vertex color as a intermediary format if this allows better painting performance, then render that to texture when you are done?

kodde

I think a cgfx/hlsl shader would be fast enough to handle this. Problem is getting the 3D Paint Tool to play together with the CGFX/HLSL shader properly. Essentially the 3D Paint Tool only reads/writes to a texture. Seems like it could be possible to modify the 3D Paint Tool MEL-files if you can reverse engineer them to find an alternate way to define what texture you read/write to without automatically getting this info from the shader node.

antweiler

In case, Maya LT is an option for you, Shader FX is supposed to handle realtime Terrain Layer painting.
Another option would be to simply use the UDK to paint your maps with a simple Terrain material, and export them from there, but I dont know if its legal to do this for commercial work...

kodde

Oh you mean the new real-time shader feature that Autodesk decided to put in Maya LT but not give their premium customers? How nice of Autodesk... really. *annoyed*