Terrain modeling and texture baking

Unity Engine
1

Hello, I was hoping someone might be able to lend me a bit of advice…

I’m presently looking between Terragen and WorldMachine 2 for terrain modeling and texture baking (I’m going to use it for, among other things, iPhone development, so Unity’s heightmap terrains aren’t an option). Now with conventional terrain, either of those would probably be okay (though I’m interested in hearing if you have a preference and why), but in my case, I’m also going to need terrains with features like those found in Monument Valley, UT/AZ. Namely, the lines of rock strata you see on an eroded vertical cliff face.

From what I understand, both World Machine and Terragen will let you set up such strata, but both of them render the baked terrain texture as an overhead projection, meaning if you have a purely (or nearly) vertical cliff face, the texture’s going to be stretched across those polys and you won’t get the lines of strata since the texture consists of only those parts of the terrain which are visible from directly above.

So I’m looking for a tool that can both produce the procedural textures based on the terrain geometry, as well as actually bake that into a texture, complete with UVs in the exported terrain mesh.

I’d read that Vue could do this, and so I downloaded the free Vue 6 Infinite PLE to try it out, and not only did I find it difficult to accomplish, but when I finally did my mesh and materials export, it came through (in Cheetah) all wonky and completely unusable. But alas, even if I could get it to work, Vue is rather pricey.

So is there a way to do this? And if not, then my fallback choices are Terragen and World Machine. Of those two, which do you prefer and why? Or if there’s a better tool (preferably one that can do what I described above), I’m all ears!

2

I’ve played with Terragen, both the old 0.9 and the preview TG2. When I launched WM2, I was instantly in love with it. The one thing that sucks is that it doesn’t have a Mac port, but it runs fine in VMWare.

For your problem, it does allow you to access those steep parts seperately (through the filters), so if anything else fails, you could at least export a map of those areas to handle with another tool.

3

Oh really? I was of the impression that WM2 only rendered a texture from overhead.

I have the demo sitting here, could you tell me where I need to look to see how to get texture information for the sides?

Thanks so much for the feedback. I also thought about Cararra (see the last paragraph below) which is currently on sale.

I did figure in Terragen, though it would be a pain, you can set the camera to view from the side and set it to orthographic. That would give you a side view, but only for a single unobstructed feature. Then you’d have to remove the obstructing feature through the heightmap editor to reveal the next feature and do another render. And you’d have to repeat this process for all four sides! Sounds like a total pain. But if WM2 can do this that would be awesome.

The ideal solution, of course, would be something like a texture baker, that would write the UVs and do all of this automatically. I had hoped Vue would do that, but I couldn’t get it to work. I also looked at Cararra, but it requires a separate tool to perform baking, and I’m told it doesn’t work all that well. If anyone has used Cararra to do this, I’d like to know if it is possible.

4

Hi Brady,

I have Carrara Pro 6.0 and the “Baker” plugin. I posted a thread here some months ago showing some tests I made using Carrara Pro to create a terrain to be used in Unity. I haven’t used Carrara much over the past year or so and use Blender almost exclusively now-a-days.

If all you want to use Carrara for is terrains, then you don’t want the Baker plug in. It doesn’t work with Carrara terrains. In fact, it doesn’t work that well at all. The price on Carrara Pro is pretty tempting I’m sure, but for just terrain generation you can probably just use Carrara 3D Express.

The method I used in the sample I tested was to set up an ortho camera directly overhead and render that image. Then for the height map I exported this from the terrain editor. The result was pretty good, but not as good was what can be accomplished with other tools.

Have you tried Eric’s Fractscape? http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=9388&highlight=terrain If you’re creating terrains for Unity it’s a worthwhile tool to have in your quiver.

Also, have you tried creating terrains in Blender? I normally create my terrains as meshes, but the baking tools in Blender are excellent, as are the UV mapping tools. Much better than Carrara in those two areas.

5

Thanks for the info! No, I hadn’t tried Fractscape. I’ll give that a look.

It sounds like Cararra is a no-go for me then. The terrain generation isn’t the big obstacle for me since I’m mostly using GIS data. The only real terrain generation/modification feature I really need at the moment is realistic erosion, which WorldMachine can do really well (as well as Vue).

As for Blender, well, the problem is sort of two-fold. I need baking (which I get in Cheetah as well), but what needs to be baked is textures which are automatically created by the terrain generator so that I don’t have to manually paint the features onto all the terrain features. WM2 and Terragen both allow you to set slope limits, altitude limits, etc, to automatically generate rock strata, snow layers, tree lines, etc. What I’m looking for is the combined ability to generate this information, then bake it, or at the very least, provide me a method (without pulling any hair) to export this information somehow so it can be added in a modeler.

I know that may be a tall (or presently impossible) order, but if some solution out there can do this, that’s what I’m looking for.

6

Well, I found a tool that seems to fit the bill, though its cost is somewhat prohibitive for me at the moment. It’s Grome (Quad Software | Technology that makes it simple). It allows texturing the terrain from any direction!

I’ve also noticed the CryEngine seems to do something like this, but I haven’t used it at all to see if it offers any kind of export functionality. If anyone’s used it, maybe you can clear this up.

Surprisingly, Grome looks like the best tool for the job and is geared directly at professional game development. Which is why it struck me odd that it also caters specifically to Torque. :lol: If anyone’s used it, I’d love to hear your experiences.

7

If you have Vue.
You can get all the data out
just export the terrain from the Terrain Editor, you should see options to export the texture.

8

I have the Vue PLE, but when I exported everything, the terrain mesh was broken up into tiny, weird pieces. It’s like it grabbed random tris from all over the terrain and tossed them into one group, and did this like 30 times. And the texture came through like a bunch of noise.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong though.