Hi there,
Been working on a terrain in mudbox, I need to export it to WM but the only way I can see is to extract a displacement map which can be imported in WM as a heightmap, but the problem is displacement maps aren’t precisely generated, you’ll get extra black/whites on certain areas so it comes up totally different in WM.
My request is to share with me if anybody else here knows a solution, (Well im a CryENGINE 3 guy, there are a lot here I guess)
Alireza,
Cheers.
I use the same technique of creating a map in Mudbox, importing it into WM as a heightmap and then importing it into CryEngine as a BMP heightmap. I’m not seeing vast differences between each stage in my results, but perhaps I am not being picky enough to see it. Can you post examples pics so I can check it out?
In any case, my workflow is:
Sculpt a decent looking version of the land - pre-erosion, it will be affected by erosion, snow and coast - try to compensate for that.
Export it as a 16 FP TIFF, had problems with pretty much every other format.
Set the max terrain height in WM to a power of two that makes sense for your landmass e.g for a 2km terrain I might choose a max height of 1024m or even 512m if it’s going to be fairly flat.
Load into WM - do magic stuff, export it as a PGM file. I am currently putting my oceans at another power of two figure, generally choosing 1/4 the max height e.g. 512m/256m/128m. Powers of two take some guesswork out - it’s either in the right spot or out by 2x, 4x, etc.
Create a new map. Set it’s max height to the same as you did for WM.
Load the heightmap into CryEngine. Adjust the ocean to it’s expected level. Things should look pretty good about now.
Import my coverage map, save, build the textures.
If anything is out of place, it’s probably because of the powers of two thing. The biggest issues I tend to have is not judging the size of terrain areas and getting them massively bigger than expected because it’s tiny in Mudbox and huge when it’s a 4km map you’re running around on in Cry 
Forgot to add an important part.
I find it is better with terrain to export the displacement map in Mudbox using subdivision. There’s no guessing how far to raycast and it works every time for me.
With ‘Displacement Map Options’ I tend to keep normalize off. That way the whites and blacks should match up with either the highest or lowest map points.
Thanks man!
Actually what I did was to add a second plane under the first plane (Terrain) and because of the extra density it gives to the first later the displ map comes out accurate, I mean theres no more extra blacks (holes)
The format I use is 16bit integet btw, I’ll try FP for now on 
Many thanks.
Ah, now it’s clear what was happening. I had assumed you had used two planes to create the displacement since the Wenda tutorial does cover that. If you try and do a displacement map using say sub 0 - sub 5 on the same plane what happens is something that looks a reasonable amount like what you expected but with bumps, lumps and weirdness all over the place.
Correct technique is as you discovered to create one plane for sculpting and another (which you can lock and hide if you like) in the exact spot as the sculpting place from which you will calculate displacement.
Didn’t watch Wenda’s entire tutorial, I thought being good at mudbox would be enough, but I see its not 
Anyways, I’ve migrated to zBrush, much powerful
I thought I’d post here first.
I’m exporting out a heightmap from WM and bringing it into Mudbox for editing. When I bake out the heightmap from mudbox, even I dont sculpt on it at all, the heightmap looks quite a bit different white level wise. Do you know how I can keep this consistent when baking out of mudbox?
I found a slight work around is when i import the baked heightmap from Mudbox and bring it into World Machine, i can set the altitude setting to full range. The levels are slightly different, but its close. I need it to be the exact same though.
Attached is an image to show you what I mean.
Edit: I figured it out. When baking in mudbox, make sure your low poly is center height on the the high poly. Bring it in as a natural altitude in a file input in WM will put everything into place.