I’ve found that I can use World Machine to create Splat Maps which
can then be used to export height-maps & textures that I can use to create UE4 materials that are automatically blended
on the game map in the correct locations.
Question:
Can I use this (or a different) technique to create more complex splat-maps (or something else) that
will allow me to place Trees, Boulders or maybe even complex meshing like buildings on my maps.
Can World Machine do this? Or, maybe there’s another tool or process that would work better?
What currently is supported that you can restrict the paint tool for foliage to a certain layer in your landscape. Means you can export a splatmap e.g. for grass and restrict to paint grass meshes only on this layer.
Automatic placement is not supported at the moment. Should be possible if you write your own plugin to handle this kind of placement though.
I tried this. But there is a difference between painted layer and layer “painted” by a splat map.
I created a new material with a layer blend. Three layer, placed by a height map with landscape coordinates. If I apply this material, each layer ist painted at the correct corner of my landscape.
Then, I restrict my foliage to one of these three layers, but the foliage will not paint on it or anywhere else. When I actually paint with one of the three layers on my landscape, I can add foliage to it and it will only produce foliages at these manually done paintings. But I want to place it using the splat map, not my manual layer-paintings… By the way: the 3D-Grass also is only created when I use the layer-painter.
He says he restricts the trees to spawn only at the DeadLeafes Layer - which is spread using a mask - a mask for DeadLeafes. He did not paint all the kilometers of DeadLeafes-area, he is using a mask, like I did. But still, my foliage only spawns to my layer when I actually paint my grass manually on the landscape. Very frustrating…
yes I am having the same problem. I found this tut here, but its again more about painting. I did the whole tutorial and it works fine to paint. but this is not what I need. I want to references one channel in my splat map… like in this video. but how? this stuff is a bit new to me so even that painting tutorial was a bit hard to fully get till I did it a few times.
It looks like you guys are trying to use an imported texture in the content browser and then hook that up to the height input inside the material? if so that is not how it is meant to be done.
You need to import your splat maps using the landscape layer paint tool by right clicking the layer and choose “import from”. And as far as I know, there is no way to use the channel packed splat maps, you will need to render a unique grayscale layer for each layer.
The way you use the “Layer Blend” node is not necessarily wrong since you can do whatever you want with it, but it is definitely not how it was designed. The “Height” inputs there are meant to be heightmap textures that match your layers. This gives the blending some broken up heightblend modulation which increases the visual quality. It looks like you are trying to hook up an actual alpha as a height which means you are essentially modulating the stored painted weightmaps with another painted heightmap which doesn’t really make any sense.
You certainly can use your own imported RGB splatmap, but don’t expect it to have any interaction with any other landscape features like painting or procedural foliage, it will simply exist as a texture in isolation. The only tool that can leverage it is the landscape grass since you can bake anything to the grass output.
Hopefully that helps.
It was hard to fallow your video being the noob that I am and the general overview nature of that tutorial.
I basically want to do exactly what you are doing in the video with the trees. that being, only allowing them to run there spawn protocol on a given map sized mask.
If you find a few minuets I would love a detailed rundown of how how you go about using a (gray scale .PNG?) as masking info for the foliage spawning tool. not the grass one. I have that one working but it lacks control.
