Roads on terrain
Hello,
I'm always so passionate for making terrains using Mudbox, WM2 workflow however, when it comes down to implementing gameplay elements in the world I usually have no clue how its done in other games such as BF3's landscapes (they did fantastic work there).
Those of you that are using WM2 know that when using erosion nodes it totally destroys the details you have sculpted on the heightmap before. (movement routs for example).
And masking the roads is nearly not possible. either it won't be done accurately or it will terribly affect the erosion quality.
Please take a look below.
This is the average look of the above roads carved into terrain:
An option is to add the roads using the game engine later on which will usually give the results below:
Smoothing those would kill the road or else kill the erosion in order to save the roads.
Last option is handwork and doing long hours of handwork to make the shapes into the terrain is just not a good approach for 4k-8k maps.
The way DICE says its done is they sculpt the basic shape of the terrain first in FrostEd and then use WM2 for the rest. But when terrain comes out from WM2 it's not gameplay ready.
Would really like to hear from you on this.
Thanks in advance.
Alireza.
I'm always so passionate for making terrains using Mudbox, WM2 workflow however, when it comes down to implementing gameplay elements in the world I usually have no clue how its done in other games such as BF3's landscapes (they did fantastic work there).
Those of you that are using WM2 know that when using erosion nodes it totally destroys the details you have sculpted on the heightmap before. (movement routs for example).
And masking the roads is nearly not possible. either it won't be done accurately or it will terribly affect the erosion quality.
Please take a look below.
This is the average look of the above roads carved into terrain:
An option is to add the roads using the game engine later on which will usually give the results below:
Smoothing those would kill the road or else kill the erosion in order to save the roads.
Last option is handwork and doing long hours of handwork to make the shapes into the terrain is just not a good approach for 4k-8k maps.
The way DICE says its done is they sculpt the basic shape of the terrain first in FrostEd and then use WM2 for the rest. But when terrain comes out from WM2 it's not gameplay ready.
Would really like to hear from you on this.
Thanks in advance.
Alireza.
Replies
1. Bring your WM height map back into mudbox (after you have added your erosion) and sculpt your roads. Bring that back into WM and export to the engine.
2. If you can use splines in the FrostEd terrain editor try it, below is the UE4 implementation:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Landscape/Editing/Splines/index.html
3. The monotonous way (best way imo) is to do it by hand within the game engine. Game ready maps from WM are not possible unless they are very simple maps with not much going on in them. I always edit the terrain via the landscape tools to flatten paths, add caves, fix texture stretching and fix any other visual problems. If you want to add more features to your map then it's a hell of a lot easier doing it with the engine terrain tools than going through the mudbox to WM workflow.
good luck