Connecting Terrains/Biomes

General Discussion
#1

I have a few questions that I need answered so I can continue work on a game project I’m working on.

  1. How do I connect different pieces of terrain I’ve created?

I’d really like to keep this inside of World Machine instead of taking the individual pieces into Mudbox, and the reason for that is I need the splatmaps for each individual biome so I can import them into UE4.
The reason I need the splatmaps is because texturing the terrain is an absolute nightmare and splatmaps make it so I can assign textures easily. (http://i.ytimg.com/vi/c88kdTPaXZQ/maxresdefault.jpg)

  1. Is it even possible to make splatmaps if I generate the maps using a tiled build?

The map size is quite large, so I have to generate tiles in WM and then connect them inside UE using World Composition, which are basically tiles that you import pieces of terrain into.

I’ve attached some pictures of the node networks I have but like I’ve stated, I have no idea how to connect them in WM.

#2

Hi there,

Take a look at the example file “Combining Terrain Types 2.tmd” included in your Open Example World->Examples for 2.3\Techniques folder.

It shows how to knit together several different types of terrain into a single scene. In the xample, each piece is defined simply, but it absolutely works the same if it is a complete node network as you’ve created here.

For question #2:

Splatmaps absolutely work with tiled output, yes. The main question you’ll have to decide is if you want to have each biome have its own set of splatmap textures or if they should share them. It works the same either way, its’ just a question of how many splat bitmap you need to have.

If you have any questions on splatmap generation, feel free to post them here. There are also some examples creating splatmaps, for example “Splatmap Converter.tmd” in the same folder as the above.

#3

Thank you for the reply. I’m having trouble understanding how I can manually piece my world together with the chooser node.
I’ve attached a hastily drawn picture of the map so you can see what I’m trying to do.

#4

Bumping. Can anyone help with this?

#5

If you post your TMD file, I can show you by modifying the world. But in a nutshell:

Use the layout generator to draw masks representing where you want each biome to exist. So for example, sketch out a polygon covering the desert area, etc. You can tweak the falloff distance and curve to make sure the transition is smooth enough.

Create a new layout for each biome you want to place.

Now we need to accumulate your different terrain types together using a chain of choosers.

Place a first chooser and make as inputs the first two terrain types. (The first input will end up being your “base terrain type”, that will exist anywhere you haven’t specified something else.) Wire the control input C up to your layout generator governing the placement of the second type. The output will be a merging of the two terrains according to your layout mask.

Now place another chooser, and make the first input be the output of the first one. Wire up your next terrain type and layout mask to control the placement of that biome. Repeat until done.

Of course, you’ll probably have to adjust the relative elevations to make them fit together well – the “height preserving” choser mode in WM 3.x dev can help with this.

Is that of use?

#6

So I finally got around to bridging all my biomes together and noticed that in your edited file, the snow mountain and volcano mostly kept their heights, but that was not the case for my actual work file. Both of those biomes lost height and detail immensely and I’m not sure why. I know that our render extents were different (yours being 147km2 and mine 215km2) but I don’t know if that would have anything to do with it. My settings for the nodes were exactly the same as to preserve height, but things like the volcano were lost completely.

Edit: Actually, the whole world is almost flat. Is the only way to prevent this with the height preserving nodes in WM3? This is a really big issue atm. The link below is of a render of my sand dunes when they were just by themselves as a single biome. They have a lot of depth that I don’t want them to lose when attaching them in WM.

#7

I’d have to see how you assembled your world; but in general, no, this is not normal.

Note that when you make your render extents huge, you do reduce your detail scale (reported in your project settings as meters/pixel). If you are dramatically increasing the size of your world but want the same detail, you have no choice but to increase your resolution as well. This is just a mathematical relationship.

The other thing is perception of size – a 1000m mountain definitely does not look so tall when viewed against 215km of other terrain – it will barely be a blip on the surface, wheras if viewed from up close (a couple kilometers) it will look massive. WM is not doing anything internally different, but where you place your view certainly does give a different feel – and if you couple this with a coarsened resolution, you end up viewing the terrain from much farther away than before, making everything feel smaller.

#8

wezadi@rr.manidn.com

#9

fofijigal@rr.manidn.com

#10

davidgai666@outlook.com

#11