Standard AAA Pipeline for Terrain?

I've always wondered how AAA / Professional studios handle using external terrain generation tools.

From what I can tell, a lot of studios use a third party software such as World Machine, and import the height maps into their engine, and that's it. Wouldn't this make editing terrain for say houses to be flat impossible? If they do have tools in engine to do things like that, wouldn't they be cleared if the height maps were updated / reimorted? Unless things like house area flattening was only done via automation, then naturally it wouldn't clear that, but it would still result in not being able to change any terrain in the game, which I feel like really really loses the fidelety needed.

Is the major gain of having a powerful terrain generator just way larger than the gain of in-engine editing?

 

Separate heightmap layers for their edits and imported base terrain is likely the answer

 

That's something I'm personally going to try to get working. Sadly due to how unity works it'll probably be pretty hacky

 

In most cases I don't think there is any special tools to overcome the kind of problems you mentioned. If you import a heightmap to unity, make some changes using terrain sculpting tools, you can export the revised heightmap from unity.

In any case, the worst case scenario of redoing a bit of work isn't a show-stopper.

 

I was mainly referring to AAA studios, not Unity in general. With massive worlds, redoing hundreds of hours of work is indeed a show-stopper, so I'm wondering if many of them mess with in-editor tools at all, or just use external tools entirely. My world spans several miles, so naturally I wouldn't want to lose my work either.

I know Horizon Zero Dawn used in-house procedural tools, for example. A key feature with their tools was the ability to regenerate and tweak whatever parameters they wanted, without losing their manual work.

 

You can google a few games that unveil there process, Ubi soft game are generally well documented, far cry and ghost recon have plenty coverage on these issue at least.

 

^ https://forum.unity.com/threads/ghost-recon-wildlands-terrain.712856/

Got an hour? Watch this:

 

And perhaps this:

 

You can just create flat single tone greyscale rects where the houses should be if you use a heightmap. Make the grey as close to surrounding heightmap greys as possible to avoid humps and ditches.