Terrain Tools Feedback & Suggested improvements.
Suggested reading for Devs:
Bruneton & Neyret’s EG’12 scalable, high-quality tree imposter method for forest rendering.
Terrain system at this time we can select an area of our terrain generated by our imported height map to copy to another location on our same terrain, Please can this be updated to also take into consideration the base map data from the textures imported for material base. E.g if i copy a selection of the map (height) can the tool be updated to also copy the Colour map base texture data, Normal map, etc etc with that height data that your transferring to another area of the terrain. Having ONLY the height information copied from one spot to another without the other maps just ruins the base textures created. If you get that working the terrain tool becomes a whole lot more usable.
Right click the image and select open in new tab for full res
http://www.badlamagames.com/Images/New1PP.jpg
Right click the image and select open in new tab for full res
http://www.badlamagames.com/Images/3.jpg
For Example This is a couple of the test Environment’s ive been building. Has height map,Normal,Grass/Rock Mask/Sand Mask/Roughness Map (basicly all the PBR maps you need. Within the terrain tool i may want to copy one area of the map i like to another area i don’t like that much, But as is the tool would only copy the height info and break all the other imported PBR maps ive created. But if it copied all the relevant map data from each texture terrain editing from imported maps becomes superb. Please Please Please make this happen.
Another request for terrain & Foliage tool, I’m building my environments in high end 3d app (Blender in this case). What id really like is to be able to use Blenders Particle system to distribute tree models, rocks etc onto my terrain directly in the high end tool, but then once ive got what i like to be able to turn each of those hair particles into a dummy which holds the object type, position, rotation, scale (say i have 100,000 pine trees instanced) then to be able to export that set of dummy’s with FBX into UE4 terrain foliage tool and the foliage tool to recognise the name prefix (for example pine) that you have imported as mesh into UE4 and then scatter instances of the object across the map in the positions matched by the imported dummy’s (which would mean no having to go round painting in foliage by hand, Also being able to mask map areas with a black and white map would also be helpful (so if you are hand painting foliage in it will only add objects for example where black is in the mask map
Cheers KB