External Terrain Creation Tools

[steve.brodie]

There is a lot of posts on World Builder as an external terrain creation tool on the forum. I was wondering if anyone had tried Grome as it also looked like a powerful tool with a good range of input and output files?

 

Was the Valley Demo terrain created entirely in Unigine or was World Builder or Grome used?

 

Also, as has been previously discussed, it would be good if Unigine supported import of some of the GIS based gridded, DTM (heightmaps). For example,

USGS Digital Elevation Model GeoTIFF Format,

Raw,

terragen (.ter)

kml Google Earth

[binstream]

We used WorldMachine for Valley demo.

[demostenes]

WM is very good, for texturing is better L3DT.

[ivan.cuevas]

World Machine +1

[ulf.schroeter]

some related posts

[steve.brodie]

Haha, thanks for the related posts Ulf - wish forum search worked better :D searched for World Machine a few time but nothing.

 

Denis : Great to hear that world machine was used for Valley demo, i think that, along with Shanes epic tiling for me to go with World Machine.

 

Any chance of making the Valley world machine tmd files available in downloads, so everyone can have a peek.

 

Thanks

 

So noone used Grome, it did look very nice.

[ulf.schroeter]

wish forum search worked better :D searched for World Machine a few time but nothing

 

The key is to use search on https://developer.unigine.com. Don't know why the forum search can't be fixed by the forum software provider.

 

 

Any chance of making the Valley world machine tmd files available in downloads, so everyone can have a peek.

 

@UNIGINE: Maybe its possible to get in contact with Remnant (the person behind WM) WorldMachine for some cooperation or even placing a joint tutorial for WM-UNIGINE terrain creation on the WorldMachine homepage. There are already some tutorials for CryEngine and UDK terrain creation and importing.

[demostenes]

 

The key is to use search on https://developer.unigine.com. Don't know why the forum search can't be fixed by the forum software provider.

 

 

 

 

@UNIGINE: Maybe its possible to get in contact with Remnant (the person behind WM) WorldMachine for some cooperation or even placing a joint tutorial for WM-UNIGINE terrain creation on the WorldMachine homepage. There are already some tutorials for CryEngine and UDK terrain creation and importing.

 

Workflow for CE or UDK is identical as for Unigine (you need to generate height, normal, diffuse and alfa map). But personally for texturing and creating ARGB splat maps (alfa maps) i prefer to use l3dt, it is much easier.

[ulf.schroeter]

 

Workflow for CE or UDK is identical as for Unigine (you need to generate height, normal, diffuse and alfa map). But personally for texturing and creating ARGB splat maps (alfa maps) i prefer to use l3dt, it is much easier.

I know, the previous posting is more about UNIGINE marketing. It's always good to present a full content pipeline to potential customers.

[pluton]

Any chance of making the Valley world machine tmd files available in downloads, so everyone can have a peek.

 

I've attached tmd files used to generate Valley terrain. I used terrain_height.tmd to generate heightmap and erosion map. Then these maps were used to generate masks and diffuse map in terrain_color.tmd and terrain_masks.tmd files. So, to test attached files you need generate all these maps and link the maps to File Input devices in World Machine.

valley_terrain.zip

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Thanks Pluton, this is a great thing to share for those trying to learn WM.. it can be a daunting program to learn - especially when you are generating 500km of terrain :D

[clayton.taylor]

 

I've attached tmd files used to generate Valley terrain. I used terrain_height.tmd to generate heightmap and erosion map. Then these maps were used to generate masks and diffuse map in terrain_color.tmd and terrain_masks.tmd files. So, to test attached files you need generate all these maps and link the maps to File Input devices in World Machine.

When I try and import the terrain it says that it is an unsupported format.

[manguste]

Clayton,

 

In what version of World Machine do you try to open tmd files? Our artists use ver. 2.2.

[Cristianwolf712]

There is a lot of posts on World Builder as an external terrain creation tool on the forum. I was wondering if anyone had tried Grome as it also looked like a powerful tool with a good range of input and output files?

 

I'm relatively new to Unigine and at the beginning of integrating a working Grome 3 project. Currently there are two problems you have to deal with:

 

1) The heightmap and mask sizes are not unigine-sizes, means you get 2048,4096,... images. I have rescaled them with gimp to match the unigine size, but get a lot of artifacts in my terrain-node. Don't know how to fix that without programming an exporter tool.

 

2) For each layer-mask (textures) in Grome you get seperate grayscale images, like your heightmap, which stores the density of your texture. But as far as i noticed, unigine only supports one RGBA-mask for your whole scene. But I neither found an solution for that, nor any work-around.

Edited December 17, 2012 by Cristianwolf712

[manguste]

I'm relatively new to Unigine and at the beginning of integrating a working Grome 3 project. Currently there are two problems you have to deal with:

 

1) The heightmap and mask sizes are not unigine-sizes, means you get 2048,4096,... images. I have rescaled them with gimp to match the unigine size, but get a lot of artifacts in my terrain-node. Don't know how to fix that without programming an exporter tool.

Maybe it's texture precision issues when the texture is scaled. As we see it, the better idea is simply to add a lacking pixel.

 

2) For each layer-mask (textures) in Grome you get seperate grayscale images, like your heightmap, which stores the density of your texture. But as far as i noticed, unigine only supports one RGBA-mask for your whole scene. But I neither found an solution for that, nor any work-around.

Why, having 4 separate grayscale images as an output is perfectly OK. You need to insert your grayscale data from each of textures into R, G, B and A channels of the new texture, and save it. After that, you can use it as a mask in Unigine.