Hi Ali,
Thank you so much for the answers! Great to hear you will be able to assign materials to each layer. For reference, I would recommend you check out this showcase of LAM so you can see how it works - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkypCxc2Mzg.
Basically, you assign a master material to the landscape. This material has 5-6 layers that include grass, sand, mountain side, rocks, etc. And as you sculpt the terrain, the material updates in real time (blending and painting the landscape). The biggest benefit of LAM for folks like me is that the blending of layers is seamless and the materials all work well together.
However, the two biggest downsides of LAM are:
-Its very heavy on performance - many people complain that they cant really use LAM âout of the boxâ with anything outside of very highend cards.
-Since its realtime, the material compiles every time you make a change - The constant shader compilation can be disruptive as you cant do quick landscaping
If I were to have my wishlist, I would imagine the workflow to be something like this:
- Create base landscape with your node interface (heightmap or voxel)
- Do manual edits to the landscape (for me this is a necessary step 90% of the time to make landscape game-ready)
- Once Iâm done with an initial edit - I press a button or run a function that âre-texturesâ the map based on slope, height, etc and populates the terrain with the foliage
This would be ideal because you donât have the constant compiling of shaders (since its not ârealtimeâ like LAM), yet it keeps almost all the benefits since you can just press a button to have the whole map compile at any time.
If you could somehow make your material run well on mid-range cards, then I truly believe you would have the best landscape solution for Indies and Hobbyist out there 
Another project that might be worth checking out is this - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QoA48. I really think LA could benefit from a road tool similar to the one in this project. I especially like how the road adjusts to changes in the terrain (if you lower the terrain, the road becomes a bridge, etc).
Sorry if Iâm making too many suggestions, but I want to make sure LA is the best landscape plugin it can be - its going to be my preferred solution afterall
IIRC Ali is adding in a brush tool or set of brush tools. Not sure which to be honest. I will need to go back and read up.
It would be great if the brush textures were just alpha textures (similar to Zbrush) as those are really easy to make.
[MENTION=28980][/MENTION] - Got two questions
- Will this work seamlessly with your other plugins such as Dungeon Architect, City Architect and the like?
- Would It be possible to have Landscape Architect import and render NASA SRTM data? You can find more details > here < Just a fair warning the whole dataset is massive and covers all of the Earth.
Is the voxel terrain based on the GPU Gems 3 example, perchance?
@CoquiGames Thanks for the feedback. I havenât gotten to reducing the compile time yet but it is in my todo list.
I believe if the code exposes all the necessary parameters from the auto-generated master material and change those params from the assigned dynamic material instance, it would not trigger a recompile (also the result in the viewport is immediate). Since the master material network wouldnât need to be changed when you are modifying the geometry or painting the landscape, it shouldnât trigger a recompile when the height or weights are modified on a layer. I briefly experimented with this and it looks like it should work, i might be wrong though 
That makes sense. Iâll support a workflow like this
Not at all 
Your feedback will help improve it
@HeadClot Yes it would work seamlessly with the DA and CA. I have a prototype of a basic rasterization framework that lets other plugins draw shapes on the generated heightmap and interpolate the sides with a falloff. So DA would draw the generated layout on the landscape heightmap at a certain point in the theme graph. It will also influence the weight maps on the layers to give the landscape different color, add remove foliage etc (wip)
I had a look at SRTM and it looks like a good source for lots of free test data for Landscape Architect. I went ahead an added support for it
Just drop in your *.dt2 files from the data archive into the content browser and it should create an asset. Assign that asset to the SRTM node in the theme graph
It also supports correction maps (HEM) if it is assigned to the node
I also added a blur node. I pass the SRTM data through a blur filter to remove excessive noise
@ambershee Yes it is I have a multi-threaded CPU implementation (as opposed to the GPU implementation on the paper) as I am not bound by a runtime-only constraint
This is awesome -> Snow ground.
Thank you for taking my workflow into consideration!! Canât wait for the plugin to be released - keep up the awesome work!
Hey [MENTION=28980][/MENTION] -
Got a few questions -
- How scale-able system spec wise is landscape architect?
- Can it run on high end mobile devices such as the Nvidia Shield TV?
- What is the min hardware required for landscape architect?
- Would it be possible to get a mobile setting for landscape architect?
- Does Landscape Architect support multi tile Terrain?
Bro⌠Your too Good⌠@.@ Seriously.
Definitely interested in this. I hope it comes out soon!
Absolutely brilliant
Thank you
4.13 contains lots of nice landscape improvements. Notably this:
That is awesome - Totally missed that
My only thought while reading through this thread was âWorld Machine is going to lose a lot of UE customers.â
Hey [MENTION=28980][/MENTION]
Check this out -
Would it be possible to make something like that for landscape architect?
I can see this being really useful for rapidly creating biomes (themes?), continents and / or large islands.
Just curious,
- HeadClot
Hi Ali,
Any updates on LA??