Home Technical Talk

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 -
screen25bb.jpg

Replies

  • .Wiki
    Offline / Send Message
    .Wiki polycounter lvl 8
    You can model the terrain in an external package and use tiled textures with vertex painted masks in unity.

    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 ;).
  • bharatnag
    .Wiki wrote: »
    You can model the terrain in an external package and use tiled textures with vertex painted masks in unity.

    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 ;).
    Ok Ill explore that vertex paint mask technique first then decide if it works for me. Thanks for the reply mate, really appreciate it.
  • bharatnag
    So tried sculpting and painting a generic terrain but I’m still not sure so as how to go about not making it repeat when seen from a distance. Sure it looks fine from this close but I’m sure its gonna cause trouble. Also, have no idea how would we go about stitching the edge vertices if we are to make it repeat infinitely.

    tumblr_msb3r2hy9a1s3d03io2_1280.png

    http://bharatnag.tumblr.com
  • bharatnag
    tell me guys how is it really done in production? Do you automate some splat map generation?? how is it done for infinite terrains?
  • bharatnag
  • Nosslak
    Offline / Send Message
    Nosslak polycounter lvl 12
    You should take a look at this tutorial series:
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0o3bqoM0Qg"]How to create a terrain for Cryengine and UDK Part 1/8 - YouTube[/ame]

    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.
  • Eric Chadwick
  • EarthQuake
    You should look into world machine to help build the terrain base (heightmap) and this sweet macro to generate your color overlay: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=111551

    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.

    unityterrain05.jpg

    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:

    wmnode.jpg

    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

    wmsplat.jpg

    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:
    terrainsplat01.jpg

    Textures:
    terrainglobal.jpg

    terraintiles.jpg

    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.
  • bharatnag
    hello all. This is starting to make sense. Im fairly new to game asset creation so it might take me some time to grasp all the terminology and worlkflo but thanks for the help guys. I really appreciate it.
Sign In or Register to comment.