If I make a 100x100 terrain and realize I’d like to add another 100x100 to it what can I do?
Obviously I can add another terrain, but then I’d have to match up seams, setup my textures, trees etc. again and work with 2 terrains when painting, thus it’s an extremely undesirable option.
Also, a second question: Let’s say I have 2 separate “zones” in my game. 1 ice and 1 lava. Each zone has 4 terrain textures. Is there a performance benefit to having 2 terrains with 4 textures each opposed to 1 with 8? The zones are separate so the player will never see or interact with the textures from both zones at the same time. Asking because I read something about it needing 2 splat maps opposed to 1 when you go past 4 textures and that this was bad for performance.
Well, I bought Stichscape, but that was a dud. I really don’t want to have to work with 2 or more terrains.
Now I’m out of options.
Does this mean my only options are making the terrain bigger than I know I’m going to need or to just plan ahead when making it?
Why is it this hard? Isn’t the terrain just a some textures for height and color? Wouldn’t it just be to pad those pad those textures to increase the size or something?
Currently trying to export it into photoshop to increase the size there and import it back into Unity to see if that works, but I’m not even able to open the raw in photoshop. It just gives me bs about the image being bigger than the file when I know that the file is 513x513 because I exported it.
This is bothering me a lot because I hate destructive workflows. Not being able to tweak something later on makes me afraid to even start working on my terrain in the first place.
if you need free software with a decent sculpting tools set, check out blender.
I use Zbrush (i have it through school), Autodesk Maya, and Photoshop for my terrains.
I do almost all of the work in Zbrush, and use maya for detail meshes and photoshop to edit whatever textures i may be using.
I believe there are also several height map importers available for unity, which would allow you to paint the terrain in photoshop and apply a scale factor once it has been imported.
I have nothing against the sculpting tools in Unity so I would be good to go if that was my problem. My problem deals with how to tweak an existing terrain.
Drifter, what do you do to get your terrain into Unity? Do you import it as a heightmap or split it up into tiles and import them to deal with the triangle limit? How do you get it back out again and into zbrush/maya? Is it easy to go between the 3-4 programs and tweak the terrain with your workflow or is it zbrush > maya > photoshop > unity and then it’s “burned” into unity?
If a workflow demands that I go 1-2-3 I will do whatever I can to avoid it because that is something I really can’t stand. I want to be able to go between each step as a please, i.e tweak the shape, expand the terrain, texture it, reduce the size, add some length, retexture etc.
My main issue with all this is how easy it sounds in my head. A terrain is a greyscale image and the splatmap is a RGBA image, right? Shouldn’t it be the easiest thing in the world to just add to those images similar to how canvas size works in Photoshop?
But I can’t even import my terrain into photoshop and I’ve been unable to find any help on that issue. It just keeps telling me that my image is larger than the file and if I choose a lower value all I get is a black image. Also, I have no clue what do enter in the channel and header fields.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
Someone has to have done or at least tried this and can shed some light on this.
It would be even easier to do right inside Unity as well as all you need is to add an average grey to the specified area in the height map and black to the splat map.
Edit: haha, no wonder this post looked so long. I managed to double it up…
Um, yes, Stitchscape works with separate terrains. You could have asked me that first.
1 (since it’s grayscale) and nothing, respectively. It’s a pure raw file with no information other than data.
That won’t work if you mean it literally, since terrains must be power of two plus one in size. You can’t just add some arbitrary padding.
Really, though, I find it’s easier to handle as separate terrains. Painting grass/trees across seams is a little annoying, yes, but not the end of the world. Plus you can enable/disable terrains so you can concentrate on one part as needed instead of having everything visible all the time.
Yes, in addition to 1 splatmap being faster than 2, you’re displaying half the area. I don’t even know how you’d pull off “the player will never see or interact with the textures from both zones at the same time” if you use 1 terrain. How would you avoid seeing the other zone?
I don’t think a lot of people do that, since it’s not feasible unless you have a small area and relatively little vegetation.
These are my exact settings, but it won’t work because it claims the image is larger than the file. Only if I decrese width/height will it let me import, but then with a warning that the image is smaller than the file, and the result is a black image. Guess I have a photoshop problem then.
I didn’t mean it literally. A limitation of having to double the size wouldn’t be a problem.
Yeah, I guess. Will probably adopt this workflow then. My fear initially was making a terrain that was “sligthly” too small, but like you said I would have to double it with my padding method as well.
It’s a top down perspective game. I was just wondering if I would have to render all 8 textures at all times with 1 terrain VS 4 textures at a time with 2 terrains, figuratively speaking (I know the rendering works differently).
As for buying Stitchscape, 5 bucks to an amazing member of the community isn’t exactly money out the window either way. And all in all it looks like I will end up using it.
