Programmatically generate terrain layer blending/splatmaps/weightmaps

Unity Engine
1

Hi!

I would like to generate terrain entirely programmatically based on real-world map data containing detailed terrain and vegetation information. One important part to accomplish this is to be able to programmatically create and “paint” terrain layers to give the appearance of changing ground types (e.g. forrest floor, meadows, gravel). Unfortunately, I have not been able to find information on how to do this and so I’m turning to this forum for guidance.

I found some old forum thread where splatmaps was used, but the API mentioned in that thread seems to be deprecated. What strategies / routes for accomplishing layer “blending” programmatically is available today?

Thanks in advance

(If this was posted in the wrong forum, feel free to move to correct area.)

2

Sounds like something you could do with shaders. Given some different inputs like a Height Map and some kind of Environment Map, you could pretty easily do something like this I’d imagine. I’d also believe it would be much faster than programming it on the CPU, depending on your scale.

3

I use splatmaps to darken the area of deformed terrain in this little demo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvRsMuo4AlA

Full source here:

MakeGeo is presently hosted at these locations:

https://bitbucket.org/kurtdekker/makegeo