Landscape Forced LOD; Foliage Questions

praetus

I realize that the point of landscape is to have a dynamically changing mesh but is there a way to force it to stay with a particular resolution? For example, I can see in the distance my landscape is fading between 5 different LODs but can I force it to use the quality of the 4th LOD for the entire landscape. Is this at all possible and if so...how?

Also, regarding foliage; I can use weight maps to place textures when creating a new terrain, which is fantastic. Is there a similar masking technique I can use for the foliage editor which will allow me to place grass, trees, etc via an alpha mask rather than painting directly?

Hellfire

@Landscape
chance "Max LODLevel -1" to vaule 4

@Foliage
u can paint complete Landscape Mesh with Foliage Mode and used a WorldPositionMaterial. Here my Tutorial:
http://ulrichthuemmler.blogspot.com/p/udk-world-color.html

Rekmar

Ulrich I think he means to place foliage meshes all at once with a mask without having to paint
I guess you can tell them to only paint at a certain landscape layer, then use a reeaaaaaally big brush and paint in all your terrain at once

praetus

Rekmar, you have the right idea I think. To elaborate; currently our terrain artists can make an alpha map and fill the area with different mesh sets, not unlike the legacy version of foliage volumes for UDK. The main difference being they're using an alpha map to drive the placement location on the terrain as opposed to a volume area. We're testing out UDK as a possible engine switch and I'm trying to determine the workflow will need to change from the program they currently use.

praetus

In case anyone is curious on this I found a way for this to somewhat work. You can link a foliage brush to a specific layer when you paint placement on the landscape. With that knowledge, you create a layer within the material that has no diffuse, normal, etc. information. It is just a named layer that a weight map can be created for. Next, create a target layer in the terrain editor that has a matching name and load a single channel 8 bit .raw file with the mask image that you constraining to. Link the named layer with the items you wish to paint in the foliage editor and just paint them in. The foliage will be constrained within the bounds of the mask.

For most people, they will just paint in the foliage directly, however if you need to constrain it to a particular area on your terrain, this seems to do the trick.

Rekmar

exactly that's what I was hinting: you limit the painting to a landscape layer. you just went one step further by creating an empty layer, so that it's not linked to the actual "textured" layers