Brush Tool Request: Set Height to Mesh

I just toyed around with the awesome Bezier Path Creator by Sebastian Lague. It’s quite easy to create roads with it. Of course the terrain needs to be shaped afterwards. So I modded the SetHeight Brush a bit to meet that requirement. But in general it would be nice to have SetHeight (or a derivate of it) to not only set the height of the terrain to a fixed height, but also to the y position of a mesh above or under it. Might come handy when you want to adjust the terrain height of roads, houses, rocks etc.

Could look like this:

4264321--380893--road.gif

Of course in combination with other filters (smoothing, etc) this could look better, it was just a quick prototype. But would be a nice addition to the terrain tools if Unity could support something like that out of the box :slight_smile:

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You can check out GitHub - MicroGSD/RoadArchitect: Road Architect for Unity for how they do it, but yea, it would be nice if every asset store extension was built-in.

Thanks, I’m familiar with that. My thought was more general purpose, not only road related. Sometimes you don’t want to lower e. g. houses down the terrain, sometimes you want to lift the terrain up to them.

@Rowlan we have these workflows in mind especially for curves and other geo that you might want to move around without having to resort to painting ops, regardless of whether that geo is above or below the terrain

are you applying the height stamps along the path and iteratively subdividing the path to determine where your stamps go? glad you’ve been working with the tools and API. you’re making some cool stuff!

That sounds awesome. I do notice very positive feedback whenever I create something with roads and cars. So I think that’s something Unity developers might be looking forward to.

Yes exactly, the path is subdivided, then I’m moving along the path and apply the SetHeight tool along it. That was the quickest solution for a prototype. But in the end I think matching the terrain to the bottom vertices of a mesh will be more appealing. I have to try that. Maybe also with proportional changes like e. g. the proportional editing tool in Blender to make it more smooth, here’s for quick reference, click thumbnail to see animated:

4295857--385216--pe.gif

The mesh in Blender is at first the same as I have it above with the modified SetHeight tool. Then I apply the proportional editing changes, the circle shows the influence area. I’m not sure yet how this will turn out in the end when this is done on a terrain in Unity, but e. g. a road might stick better to the terrain in that case than if I’d apply a smoothness or sharpness afterwards which might create a distance between the road and the terrain. Or a house or other gameobjects.

Has there been any updated on this?

Yeah, seems like a good feature.