Landscape thread
polycounter lvl 16
Alright, this feature is exciting to me, so I thought I'd start a thread.
I have to do a UDK workshop next week, and was gonna do some natural terrain creation with the old terrain, but now that Landscape is out it'd be nice if I could use that already.
A few things I noticed:
-When I create a big flat terrain and zoom out, a few random patches tend to flicker between black and normal colors? This is with default checkerboard material.
-Importing a heightmap from World Machine results in HUGE peaks and valleys, pretty much unusable. The values from the heightmap seem to be scaled apart very far. No way to control this?
-Can you do foliage/decolayers? I don't see this mentioned anywhere? How am I supposed to easily dress the terrain then ?
I have to do a UDK workshop next week, and was gonna do some natural terrain creation with the old terrain, but now that Landscape is out it'd be nice if I could use that already.
A few things I noticed:
-When I create a big flat terrain and zoom out, a few random patches tend to flicker between black and normal colors? This is with default checkerboard material.
-Importing a heightmap from World Machine results in HUGE peaks and valleys, pretty much unusable. The values from the heightmap seem to be scaled apart very far. No way to control this?
-Can you do foliage/decolayers? I don't see this mentioned anywhere? How am I supposed to easily dress the terrain then ?
Replies
Regarding your questions:
I haven't encountered the flickering issue, but I had patches of terrain disappear if I zoom in to closely.
You can control the intensity of your heightmap by tweaking the Z scale of your landscape actor. It might take you a bit of tweaking to get the results you want.
I don't think the foliage tools are in yet. I guess you would have to do it by hand.
Overall, I would refrain from using Landscapes for the time being; it feels like it's not finished yet and the texturing workflow seems a bit strange.
The missing foliage is a big problem I think, these landscapes can easily be HUGE, nobody is going to want to place that by hand...
I think we'll have to wait another month for it to become usefull. The texturing methods are actually a lot better, because it allows you to the "Uncharted" type of blending between maps based on a heightmap/mask. No more fake fading gradients between textures!
Haven't tested that yet though, maybe I will try that next.
Also that terrain normalmap thing works great at distance, definite improvement.
My point about the texturing workflow being strange is that you have to render your height map at a resolution that is not a power of 2 (2017x2017, 4033x4033, etc). I assume it would work perfectly fine if you follow the documentation and use layers but if you plan to use any 1:1 overlays or supermasks in your material you would need to render a second set of textures at a different resolution.
Btw, I have always though that Uncharted approach to the terrain was already possible in UDK. Could you explain what makes it so different?
For the texture blending there used to be a very archaic system. You make a separate material asset per layer, and the terrain system does all the blending for you, by basically stacking them into one big material behind the scenes. That's why you get the "hot pink" terrain if you overdo the amount of materials. Because you have no control over the final merging of materials, all you get is linear, faded blending between the layers.
Now that everything can be done in one single material, you control the exact calculations for the blending.
Yeah, I am also getting the black flickering square's on the default texture when I have a landscape created...to be honest, I believe this months release is very buggy. I even noticed a drop in performance all-around in the editor over last months iteration.
Give it another month or two, and it will be right as rain.
The flickering/disappearing has to do with the default placement of the landscape when it's generated. If you look in the properties, the x and y coordinates will be set to something crazy (mine was 60000+). From what I read online, this causes the renderer to do some strange culling. Just set the coordinates to 0,0 and it should be good.
As for the height, for some reason the landscape will be brought in at double the height it should be. (128,128,256) You can just scale this down in the properties as well. I found a value of 50-70 gives me something close to what I generated in World Machine.
Is the landscape system supported on iphone? I´ve tried searching but couldnt find anything about it.
Thanks!
Xenobite says:
- terrain is working as colision on device - it is invisible but collision is still there
definitely not the best solution to use for your level collisions
what you should is
- make terrain (ignore materials and just play with height)
- export it to your 3d app
- cut it in parts
- optimize geometry - kill as many polys you can
- set UV's properly
- export a "visible" copy of your terain SM
- edit your terrain mesh - remove polys that are not needed for colisions
* create optimized collision mesh
- import SM "for looks" into UDK and remove all colisions
- import collision mesh and make sure you use "per poly"
* this depends on your terrain style but I assume that you will have some uneven surface
- make a material with 2 textures and vertex colors for LERPing between these two
* make sure you set in mobile material 2 textures that blend with vertex colors
** in case you need more than 2 textures for terrain - you will have to plan it inside 3d app as you will have to assign extra materials (tex A mix tex B / tex A mix tex C / tex A mix tex C - you get the point)
*** you can also use another texture to blend these textures
**** in case you decided to do stuff with vertex blending - you will have to paint some vertex colors in UDK for transitions between terrain textures
***** LERPing and stuff is only so you can visualize stuff in UDK and for baking lightmaps
Any ideas? Much appreciated.
Thanks
You can just use tiling textures if you want. Even using some kind of automatic terrain generator you'd still want to have tiling textures and hand paint some of the masks.
Lets say i would like to blend 2 textures, 1 rock and 1 grass on specific areas of my Landscape how do i do that (just normal blending nothing fancy so far)?
Edit: how and where do i handpaint the masks (i guess i know how these work)?
Thank you Swizzle and the rest of you too!!