A way to make awesome playable game terrain with heightmaps

So I was playing with the terrain editor for a few days trying to make a good, playable terrain.

The type of terrain I was going for was Zelda or Halo-esque. If you play these games, you'll notice that while they provide the illusion of being believable, wide open outdoor areas, they are really mostly different sized canyons with varying height plateaus. They usually put billboarded trees, mountains and doodads on highest plateaus, to make it seem like a larger world than it is.

To this end, I decided to make my terrain in photoshop as a .raw heightmap, and import it into U3D. It took me about 10 minutes.

All I did was draw out and fill the varying height leveled plateaus freehand with the pencil tool and with the paint bucket, on different layers and in different shades of gray. The closer to black your gray is, the lower it will be, and the closer to white, the higher.

After I finished creating all my different height plateaus, I flattened the layers, applied a gaussian blur to soften the edges of the canyons. Finally, I created a new layer and rendered some clouds, and played with the opacity. This is important, because the black and white rendered clouds with a low opacity will create nice, rolling hills all over your terrain.

Anyway, here was my finished game level. I'll post screenshots when I'm done painting my textures and placing my objects.

 

Looks good. Sounds interesting. I wouldn't mind seeing a level like this. Can't wait for screenies.

 

Interesting, but how does it look in-game? The "paint it" approach to heightmaps often results in artificially flat terrains with visible steps. I see you used a few clouds to put noise in, but does it solve it?

I'm a strong proponent of using fractal terrain generation tools. They're built for creating realistic terrain.

I've taken your image into Terragen 2 and added some fractal detail and erosion. Here's the end result, maybe it's useful to you. I've also added a fractal splatmap that'll give you a smooth grass getting darker (or lighter, depending on your textures) by height and stone looking through at the steep slopes. Can be used with my terrain tools:

 

how do you import them onto the unity terrain.... i tried import hightmap... but it didnt work

 

You have to convert the .png into .raw files.

You can use Photoshop, or look at the Wiki where someone posted a Texture2Heightmap editor script.

 

Wow, that's sick Tom, thanks.

I understand that fractals are great for creating realistic terrain. But my point was that in many games, the terrain isn't realistic at all... they just provide enough details to give the illusion of realism.

See here:

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/4745/264069-ze15_super.jpg

I do however, like the idea of adding minor fractal details like you did, that looks amazing.

Also, your splatmap terrain painting plugin looks sick from the documentation. I will have to purchase it right after work

How does it work in the editor? Do you assign different textures to different colors on the map?

 

Sorry dragon, I posted it as a .png because I didn't think the browser would show a .raw as an image.

If you have photoshop, just open the .png and go to file->save as and save it as a photoshop .raw

 

I highly recommend Tom's Terrain Tools. See the link in his sig.

 

I have every intention of getting them as soon as I'm done with work

How do those texture splatmaps work? With your tools, how do you specify what texture goes to what color?

And how did you make the splatmap so fast?

 

I used 3DLT to create my terrain (splatmap), then used Tom's Terrain Tools. Looks great in Unity. I was very happy with it.

Tom has documentation here on his site. http://lemuria.org/projects/wiki/TerrainToolsDocumentation

 

Agreed. I had some nice workflows and results with World Machine 2, basically by supplying height maps and masks for erosion. Produced an excellent balance between control and automation, and WM2 can output some interesting terms to maps, like erosion flow, so for generating material masks, and other things, it's quite nice.

 

3DLT ? Whats that?

 

i think it's L3DT

 

My bad. http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/

 

Thanks, looks cool , shall test it.

 

You guys that use L3DT, WorldBuilder and Terragen, is there any good workflows for making more zelda-esque maps, versus the hyper realistic ones I keep seeing?

The point of my post and my original heightmap was that, as you notice in a lot of games, they make the details realistic, but the actual playable terrain isn't realistic at all.

Like Zelda, Hyrule Field looks beautiful and realistic for the most part, but when you look a little closer you notice that all the playable terrain is enclosed by steep canyons with billboard trees and mountain skyboxes and stuff on top, to provide the illusion of being bigger than it is.

Is there like a checkbox in any of these editors that says "enclose terrain in steep canyons"?

Heheh, I guess I'm asking for a bit much.

 

You can go in and manually change the L3DT terrain in step 1 or 2. I did this to sink all my terrain around the edges into the ocean, so you can do the same to make them mountains.

L3DT also allows you to put in elevation numbers above sea level. Easy to do. L3DT has a wizard to help you learn to use the tool until you know what you're doing.

There's a free version you can use, but I upgraded to get the larger terrain settings.

 

While I haven't used L3DT, and been a while since I used terragen, what I did in WM2 was build a kinda template setup where I could use a mask for erosion, then another map for the general height of the terrain that I cared about. The mask basically defined the hardness of the rock, so that roads and such wouldn't move, but everything else got eroded normally.

Included is a shot of what it looked like in-game, and you can likely guess what kind of game it was . Anyways, this used a complicated shader that placed snot/grass depending on time of year, but with WM2 I was able to create some extra terms that made that possible (or at least look better). Was also able to smack ambient occlusion term in so ridges were better defined. It definitely took time to setup the process, but IMO worth the effort if producing a number of environments using the same technique.

 

I've been doing something similar to RElam, using layouts in WM2 to control the shape of my world.

I've also used WM2 to create maps for the grass and textures i'm using too.

It gets a bit complex though!

Here's a screen cap to demonstrate how out of hand my WM2 setup has gotten by this point, and a couple screens of the results =]

 

geeeeeWOOOWW that looks amazing dude. You should probably just give me that heightmap

 

Fantastic terrain, capnbubs.
Are you available to make (paid) heighmaps like that?

 

Wow. The end result in Unity is stunning!

 

thanks guys, it's the first time I've really shown it to anybody. Workin on trees and rocks now.

 

What he said man, I'd totally buy something like that.

Of course, your the dude that did that blue galaxy WIP, that explains a lot haha.

If you're not going to sell them, you should definitely write a tutorial or something; that stuff is hot.

First time I've seen anything but a crysis-esque island in unity that looked good.

 

Yea, my WM2 setup was not as complex as capnbubs, but it's still surprising how quickly it can get complicated (still likely 2/3rds as complex, which is far more than I'd have expected before doing it). The application looks daunting, but it's usually pretty easy to isolate the elements you change frequently, as capnbub's image demonstrates well, I think, so the complexity of the initial setup doesn't carry over to subsequent uses of the template, or tweaking. Regardless of how serious you are about the terrain, I think WM2 is well worth trying before settling on a workflow.

 

The splatmap is also fractally generated in TG2.

The colours are simply channels, so red is the first texture you set up in your terrain, green the second, blue the third and black the fourth.

 

beautifull shots!!! could you post a video in youtube?

 

Oh Man I can Give u money for that just give that heightmap to me I Really Want It