Is it possible to export a Terrain to OBJ?

I want to make a series of grouped objects in my terrain and it would be easiest for me to do my object placement in Maya and merge the objects together into one draw call.

Only problem is - I need a guide to work from!

-Thanks!

 

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=TerrainObjExporter

--Eric

 

You can also export the heightmap and generate a mesh through that likely.
just be aware that you will lose detail, that you can no longer use foliage or the texturing and that the whole stuff can not be brought back as terrain.

to reduce draw calls, group all the additional objects into a single game object and add the combinechildren script. then all objects using the same material are merged.

But also keep in mind that merged objects mean that they will likely always be sent to driver / GPU to be rendered as the occlusion is done on the bounding box, not on triangle level. This basically means: combine stuff thats near each other in the world, instead of just everything or you will likely lose more than you gain

 

Eric5h5-

Thanks, it worked perfectly!

 

I got the ExportTerrain.js working on this, but my terrain is coming into max in the lower right quadrant. Also, its rotated 90 degrees in Y when I bring it back to Unity. (scale issues working fine)

So after countless hrs on this, it appears the ExportTerrain.js doesn't respect its position, and.... changing the "resolution" not only changes the detail of the mesh by half, it also halves the size,.. or if you set resolution to quarter, your mesh will now be a quarter of its original size (not detail like you would think).

I'm trying to export the terrain to max, add all buildings etc, and then later export those buildings and objects so they land right on my terrain in the same spot they were in Max.
Also, is the top viewport in Unity upside down? Exporting from Max 2009 fbx looks fine in Max's front viewport, and in Unity's front viewport,.. If I click on the "top" view in Unity, it flips everything upside down.
thx

 

Good catch on the "different res = different size" thing...I always had the import scale clamped to 100 in Blender, so I never noticed. The script was initially written when there was no ability to move terrains, so I added that, as well as a progress bar, and updated the script on the wiki.

The rest of it, though, is down to importer/exporter behavior and every 3D app using a different coordinate system, so there's nothing I can do about that. You have to adjust for it manually.

--Eric

 

You updated it already? Ur fast, thanks.
So it will still export the terrain to the lower right quadrant of 0,0,0 then? I imported my terrain to Maya 8.5 and it did the same thing,.. except when selecting the terrain in Maya, it crashed. memory..

I'm trying to think of how to get this working properly though,.. I guess its like Terragen in a way exporting their terrain, but is fbx open source?.. can you use fbx to export instead of obj? (I guess that still wouldn't read properly unless the exporter had presets for each app)

Thanks again Eric

btw... maybe the best way is to make a terrain in Unity, export it to Max or Maya, then fbx it back to Unity, then line up my Unity terrain with my imported/exported mesh,.. then everything i do in Max or Maya will line up perfectly. Maybe I'll do that for now...

 

If you have zBrush, you can export out either the high res object or the map and recreate it. You can then recreate all the subdivision levels so you can export out a low res model and normals to use in Maya or Max.

I created a cool terrain in Unity but want to use it in an iPhone game but you can't use the terrain engine on the iPhone. I used the above steps to export out a decent low res mesh for use. With textures, props and lighting, it looks pretty damn good.

 

Hi,

TerrainObjExporter works very well. It is there a way to export the final texture (composite) of the land?

JP

 

hum the Link dosent work !?!

 

The link has changed:

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=TerrainObjExporter

 

Does anybody know where the terrain menu the above article references is located? I cant find where the "export to obj" command is located. I see all the terrain options on the right hand side of the screen, but no drop down anywhere. Cheers!

 

The terrain menu is added when you use the script.

--Eric

 

I know this thread is old, but I have the same question as "JP" from 2010 -
- " ...Is there a way to export the final texture (composite) of the land?"

I have no trouble exporting the land, but it does not include the texture. When I attempt to re-apply it the scaling is off. Is there a modified script (or alternative method) that includes exporting of the texture to the OBJ file?

Thx & Best Wishes!
Chris

 

Not really; there's no "texture" as such, but instead a specialized terrain shader essentially creates composite textures on the fly from the splatmaps. Technically it would be possible to compute a combined texture somehow and export that, but it would likely be unusably huge, depending on various settings and splatmap size.

--Eric

 

I seem to be having an issue where selecting the terrain (I have 25 terrain tiles in a 5x5 grid) makes no difference on what gets exported.

What's even stranger is the tile it *is*exporting is #10 in the list.