Approaches to terrain generation -- heightmap, materials, shaders

This is a READ-ONLY snapshot of the Godot Community Forums when TwistedTwigleg was the owner, which is hosted for archival reasons only. The current Godot Community Forums can be found here.

Some links may point to external websites, including the current Godot Community Forums. These websites are not associated with TwistedTwigleg.

Approaches to terrain generation -- heightmap, materials, shaders

PeterSmith

Hello.
I have been trying to create terrains in quite old software called Bryce. When exporting, the textures look terrible, screenshots below.
How do you generally create terrains? Is there a shader that works off 2d or 3d texture to color a pixel based on slope-altitude-uv? Do you get 3d artists to hand paint textures? Is there some other way?

Pixophir

PeterSmith How do you generally create terrains?

From natural data, with noise or fractal functions, or modelling natural processes.

PeterSmith Is there a shader that works off 2d or 3d texture to color a pixel based on slope-altitude-uv?

Yes. That's done in the vertex stage. Altitude is available directly from the height map texture, slope via lookup of neighbours needed to calculate the slope.

PeterSmith Do you get 3d artists to hand paint textures?

Nope. Can't pay them ... but there's a plethora of free textures also for PBR workflows on the internet.

PeterSmith Is there some other way?

Texture splatting or procedural colouring are ways to clad height maps. But height maps aren't the only way to model terrain. They do the visible surface without cavities or too steep slopes.

Tomcat

PeterSmith Is there some other way?

A few Terrain Generations are mentioned here, and there was even an attempt to discuss the possibility of using geological principles… but the discussion quickly faded away.

Megalomaniak

What you get out of bryce should be used as splatmaps or masks and the issue here is the resolution then of the textures you blend between with these masks. Those textures should be tiling so as to get around the resolution issue.

It also looks like there might be some compression artifacts in there but I'm not entirely sure.

MagickPanda

[https://godotforums.org/assets/files/2022-12-15/1671115848-429843-godot4-heightmap-terrain-main-40b7.zip]

This one is from github, I modified it a bit so it works with latest 4.0 beta, I think it's mostly shader based rendering, so you might want to have a look at how it calculate terrain color based on vertex 'height' attribute.