Texturing a real world terrain based on aerial view

Unity Engine
1

Hello all. I am trying to create this area as a terrain:

1181×945 408 KB

As you can see, this is a golf course/subdivision (about 2 square km in size). I have the Real World Terrain asset and I am able to pull this terrain into Unity with the aerial view as a texture. I can paint my textures on top of the aerial view but as you could probably guess, this is EXTREMELY tedious. I would like to use the aerial view in photoshop (actually Gimp) to make gross masks and have something like Gaia (or whatever is suggested) to apply the textures to the terrain. This would give me the ability to use perlin noises and such. I don’t mind going back and refining the textures with a paint tool in Unity, but to paint this from scratch would be a nightmare.

I am also using CTS (Complete Terrain Shader), which is awesome, but DOES NOT work well with Real World Terrain. I am getting a lot of crashes. I have about 12 total terrain textures.

How would you suggest I go about this?

2

I ran across this:

Which inspired me to try a version in Photoshop/Unity

Not sure if Gimp has exact functionality like layers?..but I

Get high res image : 4K (WorldComposer)
Remove shadows (WorldComposer Image tool)
Photoshop: Combine all tiles / Posterize to 8-16 colors.

Photoshop: Create 8-16 Layers & ‘Actions’. :[Select by Color Range],[Gaussian Blur], [Exposure/Gain] [Fill Color of Selection Layer]

Combine those into one Master Action…now we have automated our masks with one click.

1428×1080 792 KB

Your going to need to a Terrain composition tool, that has an color select tool for masks.(I used TerrainComposer 2

1832×1045 609 KB

Use Masks as splat map guides in a Terrain composition tool …now you have a Terrain based on Sattelite Images to further modify/improve your game world.

Good Luck

Patrick

2 Likes
3

Nice, man! Thanks. I think this is exactly what I’m after.

4

For the only native solution in Unity, take a look at TerraLand 3


You can also create streaming server out of terrains and dynamically load and apply splatmaps on terrain in runtime.

1 Like
5

Hello,
Thanks for the useful information. I’d be interested in knowing if Gaia would be a recommended tool for terrain composition based on satellite imagery as well?