[HINTS] Tutorial on heightmaps

Hey friends and mates :slight_smile:

Today, I will give important hints about textures, applying on a heightmap, imported to the ARK Dev Kit.

As you can see on my Screenshot below, a nice shiny texture, called Beach_Sand_Wet is applied to a very simple heightmap. Caught a pic from the top, all is well. It’s nice and shiny, as it should be.

But as you can see at the bottom on the heightmap, there is a strange line, going through the texture. It is **not **on the landscape :slight_smile:

Below that line, (all) textures lost its material function. For example Beach_Sand_Wet is a blunt texture without any shine.

But there is a solution for it:

One way is to set the z-axis of your landscape from z100 to z50. Then you won’t have that “line” in your materials.

The best way however is, to raise the entire landscape on the Z-axis. Until you haven’t that issue. But do not raise it to much! If your landscape is from the sideview above the mid of the coordinates, you can’t start with you player from the surface of your landscape. You will fall below the landscape then.

I believe that line is the waterline as defined in the mat_theisland_inst, It can be removed by editing that but if you plan on having oceans on your map your best to let it stay as it adds “underwater” effects to the textures (waving light on sand etc)

Yes, of course I will have water in my Total Conversion. :slight_smile:

Thank you for that advise. Made things clearer.

I have some questions left though. I will ask you in your nice tutorial thread about :slight_smile: