Here is a snapshot of my sculpt, my sculpt with the projection plane, my height map out of Mud Box, and the results I get in World Machine. The height map barely shows in WM. Any ideas where I’m going wrong? Any help is appreciated.
Hi there,
I suspect what’s occurring is that your mudbox scaling is different from World Machine’s. There are a number of ways to deal with this: The best way is to make sure both programs are on the same page when it comes to scale. Specifically, make sure that in World Machine, the extents of your terrain input in meters are correct and match the scale in mudbox: So if your terrain bounding box is supposed to be 4000m by 4000m by 2000m tall, make sure WM is setup that way as well. (Elevation range can be set in your Project Settings).
Back to your imported file. To verify your imported terrain’s scale, after you’ve selected your file for import: take a look over in the bottom-right corner group labeled “Altitude Scaling”.
The default choice is “Natural file elevations”. This means that black in your input file will represent minimum elevation, and white will represent maximum. The reported min and max is in both scalar (0.0 - 1.0) of the full heightfield range, and also WM’s interpretation of that in meters.
The quick and dirty way to maximize your imported heightfield is to change from “Natural File Elevations” to “Full Range”, which will make sure that the input terrain is stretched to cover the entire elevation range setup in World Machine.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for that. The quick and dirty got me some better results. But seeing as I want to use this in UDK and add WM as a normal part of my work flow I’d like to make use of my Natural (file) elevations. Here are my settings in Maya and WM. Is there any problem with these settings?
I’m still getting flat results with these measurement settings. Does anyone have any recommended settings I might be able to try out between Maya and WM?
Hopefully someone else who also uses Maya/Mudbox/WM workflow can chime in here; I know there are many. I’m not personally familiar with mudbox so I can’t be as much help as I would like in terms of its export and world setup.
Update:
A bit of googling says that Mudbox’s displacement maps are centered around .5, with lower values representing depressions. Indeed, the file you posted is completely concentrated in the upper half of the height range. I don’t know if this is possible to recenter within mudbox, but if not its easy to fix in WM – add a Clamp device to the output of your file input, set it to Expand mode, and select only the top half of the height range. That device will now Expand the top half to fill the entire height range in WM. Combined with having the scales reasonably matched, that should make sure you’re seeing the same thing in both mudbox and WM
Cool Ill give it a shot, Ill post my results. Thanks again
I’m getting about the same results as the full scale quick n dirty. I guess in the end I’m just worried about how my maps will transfer into UDK. Will using full scale as opposed to natural elevations give me any drastic unwanted/noticeable results? Or am I just making to big a deal out of these options?
First, is your heightmap a 16-bit TIF ?
Then, in Mudbox, for the setting to extract the displacement map, I use Method/Ray casting, Choose Samples/Closest to lowres mesh, test Both Sides/On.
For the Search distance I have to play with different numbers before having a good result. The Best Guess button never give me some good results.
I always need to use bigger numbers generally between 75 and 150 to have a good result in Worldmachine so this is not a WM issue. In Mudbox, for terrain I don’t work at a real scale, I use a smaller one, so perhaps you will have to try different numbers.
Possibly try to change the Choose Samples parameter and again play with the search distance and perhaps you will have to switch off “test both Sides”.
Yea, I seem to be using the same settings as you so I’m not sure whats going on there. Thanks Remnant.
Alas I must keep moving forward. I’ve used the clamp to fix my problem and now I’m trying one of the macros (Coastal Overlay). But when I build it the whole thing goes flat again… And if I preview lock the previous node when it was 3d the build just goes blurry with no sign of the macro.
Hi there,
The Coastal Overlay macro, if I’m not mistaken, outputs a bitmap. Bitmaps have no height, so you will see it collapsed onto the XY plane as you have above… To see the bitmap applied to your terrain, add an Overlay device to your world, and connect the terrain heights into the terrain input and the bitmap into the bitmap input – this will let you see what they look like together!
Regarding the previous-node goes blurry:
I believe you have memory conservation enabled. This mode keeps high resolution data only for the final output devices in your network. If you want to be able to interactively work (view previous nodes, partial rebuilds, etc) it is recommended to leave memory conservation off – it works most appropriately for final builds.
The blue status color on the device is what indicates that the device built successfully but its contents were conserved.
Hey Crosser,
It sounds like you’re doing everything correctly. When exporting a heightmap to UDK, (as landscape) you can actually adjust the Z value of the landscape to whatever you want. By default it creates a landscape with X:128 Y: 128 and Z: 256. Most of the time I find this makes the landscape too tall so I always scale it down so that the values are even, but you can use this to ramp up the height of your landscape if you feel its not enough. Double click on the landscape and under Display you’ll see DrawScale3D and then the X, Y, Z values. Don’t ever change the X and Y or UDK will crash. This only works for the Z value.
I haven’t personally noticed an issue with heightmap transitions between WM and Mudbox just using the default settings of both programs. One thing you want to make sure when exporting a heightmap from Mudbox is that the Search Distance isn’t too high. If it is, it will weaken the strength of your heightmap overall. What I do when trying to figure out the correct search distance (the best guess option is ALWAYS wrong) is I put it down to a low value such as 16 and do a test render of the heightmap at 256x256 resolution. What this will do is render out your heightmap with the majority of your terrain being clipped off because its not rendering past that distance in units. (See Figure 1)
The reason you want to start so low is incase the scale of your basemesh is too small (I use my own terrain base mesh made in max because the plane in Mudbox creates a frame around your renders which is really bad). From here, based on the amount of clipping I will increase the search distance by a specific about (the number will be different depending on how much clipping is happening) in this example image, I bumped it up to 80 since it was pretty much missing everything in my heightmap at 16. This actually rendered out a perfect heightmap so you’d think I’d call it done but you’d be wrong. You want the search distance to be the lowest possible number that still shows your entire heightmap. 80 worked, but it might also render out fine at less so I always try again at a lower number once I get it right. A search distance of 64 also showed no clipping, but you’ll notice how much darker it is than the one rendered at 80. This means that the strength of the heightmap is going to be a lot better when I import it into world machine.
Finally just to make sure an even lower value won’t give me even better results, I try a search distance of 32 and low and behold, clipping is re-introduced so it looks like 64 is the magic number for this particular heightmap.
At the very least this will make sure that your heightmap is rendering out at the best possible strength from Mudbox.