We have a very large terrain built using satellite imagery for the elevation data. In a relatively small part of the terrain a user needs to interact with the environment in a first-person controller. At that spot we have a high-res mesh that was generated using LIDAR imagery. Currently we have this high-res mesh sitting on top of the Unity Terrain, but I would like to find a better way to seamlessly integrate it. Is there a way to do that?
Is there a way to do one of the following:
-
generating a heightmap from the
high-res mesh that would be used on
the terrain in conjunction with the
satellite data
-
Painting a normal or heightmap onto the terrain just as I would a diffuse
texture
-
Somehow stitching the high-res mesh
in the terrain
-
Some other way
Thoughts? Thanks…
2 Answers
2
Hello can I ask where you got the satellite data? I am looking for the same thing and there are too many formats for radar geometry survey data, I couldn’t find any that was easy to convert into a picture. Can you send me yours I’m designing a terrain also?
In exchange I can answer all your questions because I know a fair amount about terrain height maps. For a start you can make the greyscale pictures that you have into seamless tiles using for example gimp tiles seamless/make tile plug-ins in plug-ins/map you can also manually do it in detail by using a cloning brush, cloning areas along the sides etc
You can also take the picture and rotate it around and 4 directions and stick the 4 together it will be tiles
To tile textures you need seamless textures.
you can also fade the edges of your textures and add them together as squares so the edges overlap in the fade areas.
The other way, which is far more interesting, is that you place cross fading 3d brushes over your height maps and add them together or multiply them together if they are in the range 0-1. to make a cross fading 3d brush you can use the texture like the 1st brush in this picture
except don’t make it round necessarily, make the brushes all kinds of bean shapes or mountain shapes just with a gradient from white to dark, and use that to multiply your height maps, or make some brushes from sines and Perlin noise, if you prefer doing it in maths. Then what you can do is multiply the mountains by the brush shapes, and add them together in all kinds of strange combinations, it enables you to mix different types of mountain height maps together, you can also add them on top of each other and multiply them, for example if you have a flat height map with holes in you multiply that with the mountain and it will make mountains with crevasses in them. if you have any good HQ terrain heightmaps that i can use for free, please send me a PM. thanks.
Hi, ZoomDomain. I checked with the other group and they said they used Uniweb with Google Maps for Unity. Uniweb is $55 on the Asset Store, but Google Maps is free. I haven’t used it but you might be able to get what you want with just the Google Maps package.
Any thoughts on importing custom brushes to use on terrain? I’ve found a thread that explains it here, but it doesn’t work. Maybe it’s a Unity 4 issue.
I should mention one more method we tried: I wrote a quick surface shader that blended a tiled diffuse map using UV Channel 1 with a planar mapped alpha on UV Channel 2 that softly blended the edges around the outside. This looked great...until it was lit. The blended areas would still cast shadows making for a very undesirable effect.
– phfatmonkey