Normally…
Now, as most of you know, since I have a nice high detail mesh, and an efficient low res mesh, I have the means for making a normal map. This will allow me to preserve much of the detail of the high res mesh and display it on the low res one. Now, being on a mac means I don’t have XNormal, which is by far and away the most popular way to make normal maps. Luckily, I have access to a different app that does a good job making normal maps as well as a few other handy features, the app Substance Designer. If you haven’t heard of SD, I’d recommend taking the time for a brief overview:
It’s basically one of the coolest things on earth when it comes to making textures and materials. And, more importantly for this current post, they have many texture “bakers” which take info from a mesh and create 2D image map data out of it. Be it the normal data of the high res mesh, the ambient occlusion lighting data from that same mesh, or a simplified height map from the low res mesh, it just takes a few clicks and you have it all, in whatever format and resolution you might need. Very very handy. Using SD made it simple to create the normal map I needed:
I also spent a bit too much time playing around with making a nice blending material with snow at the peaks and grass at the base, and such. Only to realize that it would be very very time consuming to have to make a substance for each combination of mesh and biome type that Zeustiak was asking for. So, I decided to do all the blending work inside UE itself in order to make more efficient use of time and re-use of resources. Still, I needed a blending map. To create a decent blending map for the materials in UE, I took the original EXR height map and adjusted its exposure and levels to get this:
Getting all this into the engine and properly set up took way less time then I would have expected, and is one of the ways in which UE really shines in my opinion. Once I had this workflow all smoothed out, I am now able to go from tweaking shaders in Terragen to find a mountain I like to having it in the engine in less then an hour. That’s pretty darn good IMOHO. It’s that speed of implementation that is key for modern production.
So, that’s how I made the terrain tiles for Zeustiak’s map generator. Any questions, thoughts, feedback, please fire away. And thanks for taking the time to read. Cheers,
J^2