Looking for a game engine with an advanced terrain editor

A_White_Guy

Hi,
I am looking for a game engine that has some advanced features when in comes to terrain sculpting and painting. I know this is kind of a weird question, so i will explain some more.

Basicly what i want to do is be able to paint very fine terrain texture detail to a low poly heightmap. If you have ever played World of Warcraft and looked at its terrain, you would know what i am talking about.

here is an example:


As you can see, the heightmap itself is low poly, but the resolution at which the terrain texture itself is painted on to the heightmap is much higher. This allows for painting cracks in rocks and terrain features very easily without modelling anything and personally I love how it turns out.

Anyway the results in that picture are what i want to accomplish, and if any of you know a game engine that can achieve them than i would appreciate you telling me what it is also if there is a program that can do the same it is better than nothing

Dataday

Well, UDK can do that. Blizzard's engine is a special case I believe, since they designed it to be easy (painting directly onto surface with tiled textures). UDK allows you generate/sculpt terrain, and then you can load in tiled textures and paint them on the surface with layers.

Justin Meisse

AFAIK WoW's texture system is very simple, it has texture blending and vertex colors. Judging by the texture stretching it just has flat UVs projected from the up axis, there are ways to project textures on all axises and blend them in UDK and possibly Unity.

Something I haven't seen too much of that was used in Warhammer Online (Gamebryo) was the ability to use terrain textures with alpha channels, typically the top few paint layers would be leafy plants & rocks that had alpha transparency on them, they would blend pretty nicely into any terrain texture.

passerby

the terrain looks likly it was just made as a mesh in a 3d package than painted with vertex paint for a texture mask.

Justin Meisse

passerby wrote: »

the terrain looks likly it was just made as a mesh in a 3d package than painted with vertex paint for a texture mask.

They have a terrain editor, there was a video a while back showing it off. It's not using vertex blending, vertex colors are used to paint shadows and highlights over the terrain. From my experience, most heightmap terrain editors store the texture blemd layers as greyscale images, I believe UDK, Crytek and Unity function this way.