Generate a "placement map" in WM

General Discussion
1

hello,

I was thinking about a way, to speed up populating a terrain (in Unity). In unity, you can “paint” things like trees on a terrain - maybe there is a way to do a “placement mask” or something like that in WM, like a splatmap, but for placing objects?

Any ideas or possible workflows welcome :slight_smile:

2

I don’t use Unity but explain more.
Do you want to make placement mask for Meshes?

3

right. like a mask or splatmap, but it should indicate, where obects (meshes) should be placed

4

Nice.
I do not use organic material in my game levels!!! :slight_smile: ???
Because my game levels take place in space . Not on Earth … :slight_smile:
But I like the ide.
In my case I only use, sand Flow, rocks, cliff, pebbles, lava, etc

I think you need to look at a place and see how trees etc are located, maybe around water, lakes, rivers . Might need to check the slope angels also

5

good point!

6

Wow, this is exactly what I am doing in Unreal 4 right now, lol.

I output 3 meshes of my terrain covering different heights, and did a tiled export of the meshes. The problem I’m having is understanding at what scale & location I need to set the meshes to make them match my in game terrain, which was exported from WM as a single height map of 8129px. I can set up the masks visually, but I want to calculate the location and scale for the mask so I don’t need to guess every time.

I don’t know how foliage works in Unity, but in Unreal 4, you can’t fill a landscape with foliage, but you can fill a mesh, so I’m filling each color mesh with different foliage, then dropping all the foliage to the ground.

7

I realized I needed more variety in my foliage so I subdivided each of the 3 foliage masks to create 6 regions total.

2 Grey shades- Mountains regions
2 Green shades - Forest Regions
2 Yellow shades - Beach Regions

8

Interesting! I can paint meshes on a Landscape layer in UDK and it seems to work in UE4 also.

9

hmmm, but what about unity ? :wink:

10

you should check some 3rd party assets like:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7065
for placing grass and trees and more

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5664
for better shading

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14954
scattering stuff

there might be some other assets but I would recommend these