Terrain Texturing Tips
OK so moving ahead with the game, I need to build an airbase and I've already started building assets for it. One thing I'm not very sure of is how do you texture an extremely large terrain. I mean till now i used to project a uv map from the top view and then paint textures on photoshop but the results were not very good, kinda blurry.
1.So how to go about it.
2.Also, we are using Unity so is it better to use unity's terrain building tools or should we sculpt it somewhere else.
3. our game is going to be a flight simulator game with a need of enormous terrain so how is it actually done? What actually is the way to go about large terrains? Repeating stuff or what?
This is the benchmark that we have as far as the textures go -
1.So how to go about it.
2.Also, we are using Unity so is it better to use unity's terrain building tools or should we sculpt it somewhere else.
3. our game is going to be a flight simulator game with a need of enormous terrain so how is it actually done? What actually is the way to go about large terrains? Repeating stuff or what?
This is the benchmark that we have as far as the textures go -
Replies
But I would use the internal landscape tools. I guess its better then importing one large landscale mesh.
You only need some tileable textures and it looks like you have some
Because this is a flight simulator I would create the landscape with really low detail and create a seperate landscape mesh for the airport that fits in. So you will have more ground detail on the place where you on the ground
http://bharatnag.tumblr.com
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If you need something very big it might be worthwhile to just skip the sculpting part and jump straight in with layered noise. It'll be harder to make that look good without making everything look very similar, but once you set it up properly you won't need much manual work.
Though if it is at all feasible I would recommend starting from a sculpt.
I don't know if anything's changed since I last checked (last summer), but you might need some special shaders for using masks from a program as World Machine in Unity as well. For my project we ended up using Toms Terrain Tools as it seemed to fill most of our needs and was cheap.
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironmentTerrain
I used that for some terrain content that we're using to test the terrain shaders that will be released with the next version of Marmoset Skyshop.
I managed to get that color macro to export a nice base for a splat map, but I ended up doing a lot of extra work on the splat map in photoshop as well. Painting splat maps in unity is kind of painful to do by hand.
Initially I had trouble getting the bcore color script to work when I tried hooking up my nodes in world machine, so instead I used the sample file included with bcore and simply plugged my already generated height map into it. This generates a lot faster too, esp at 4K .
Here is what my WM file to generate the splat map looks like:
And here are the bcore macros set up to spit out a splat map of sorts (I was just sort of winging it at this point, but it works well for a base). Its important to make a copy of the bcore macro and plug it into the splat alpha (as the macro is only meant to write into RGB), and then enter the approprate colors to pull the final layer into the alpha
You could also use the "select color range" function in photoshop to make a base splat out of your color overlay map as well. I did this a bit in combination with the map I exported from the bcore script, while updating the splat in Unity as I made changes.
Final Splat map:
Textures:
For the individual tiling textures I tried to make them desaturated and bright, so I can add a lot of the color with the color variation overlay map. I think this worked really well, and its a lot easier to hide tiling artifacts this way.