Trying something different here. I've been trying to create maps for some time now, with limited success. What I enjoy doing is creating the raw terrains. So I'm putting out this terrain for anyone who wants to make a map out of it. I've included the following files: - Heightmap (normalized, to be scaled as you see fit) - Masks for three levels, intended as grassy scrub, rocky cliffs, and sandy lower badlands - Overlay from a generic sat map - 3D preview for scaling context - Gaea .tor file so you can reprocess as you like I'm using the free community edition of Gaea, so I'm limited to 1024 exports. If you have a paid version, you can re-bake a bigger map. Enjoy...
Here's another one on a similar theme. This terrain is a combination of Gaea's Worselands geoprimitive with a fault running down the middle. I've included the same elements as the terrain above, but added a raw heightmap, not normalized to the full 0-255 range. See which one works better.
I could likely make this into a BeamNG map as I did most of my studies in Geospatial mapping. Have you been able to get it into BeamNG at all, or not at all?
I've been using Gaea (the free version) and the max res heightmaps (1024) work fine with the terrain importer. Not sure about exporting it as a mesh. Using the snow brush in Gaea, then exporting it as a black and white mask works well in automatically painting down rock and grass.
I can import the terrains, but I'm never happy with the result. Only having 256 shades of grey means a lot of smoothing to eliminate terracing, which kills the fine detail. Plus, I'm still learning how to get all the terrain textures I want, formatted the way I want. For now I'm happy to produce cool terrain maps while I learn how to turn them into decent maps. @rmfurm, I'll have to try that snow masking method. Sound like it would create a cool result.
I'll upload my files that i used to make a simple island map once i get home, but the snow node works wonders with making cliffs and grass look really realistic for such a simple tool. I haven't been able to get the SatMap node to work unfortunately, something about underlay nodes and insufficient values. If you look at ECUSA terrain materials (i think the directory is steam/steamapps/common/BeamNG.Drive/content/levels/East_Coast_Usa/art/terrain), you'll see one that looks like a satellite image. That makes me think you could export the SatMap into a material, set it to a brush and paint over the map using only one ingame brush, but having multiple colours (you would still have problems setting the base material aspect, such as whether it should act as asphalt or sand). I'm pretty new to this myself, i've made maps in the past, but never making custom materials nor heightmaps. It's been a struggle between making a Gaea map that allows for both gameplay and looking realistic. Many mountains i make have steep cliffs and not many flat areas for towns. Your maps look great tho
That's the easy part. Use Gimp to convert the SatMap to a .dds, and use it as the diffuse texture for the primary materials of the map.
This is just a very basic map that i made. I'll test your material method, but i don't think you could have both rock and grass in the same material, due to them having to have different qualities (grip, etc.) --- Post updated --- I've just looked at your maps, and wow, they are much better than mine . If you could make an island, maybe like the one i made, that would be so good! I've been trying to use the slope feature just like yours, but it never seems to work for me. You could get the map creator to list you in the authors or description of the map, but you might not be able to enforce that. I'm sure most people, including me, would be more than happy to credit you and your skills .
The trick with the overlay is to edit each material that's defined by a mask, adding that one SatMap as the diffuse texture. Close up, you can see the different material textures, but the overlay defines the overall color scheme. If you paint other textures on top, they'll have their own colors. I got the idea from examining the ECA materials. They all use one dds overlay as their diffuse texture. Your map is pretty cool. Good use of the canyonizer. If I can suggest a couple of changes to make the edges more realistic: Clamp the worselands down to about 50%, then combine using Max at 50%. That way you don't get the "moat" effect around the base of the mountain. The erosion pass after the zero borders extends the erosion effects into the sea. I played around with your map for a while and came up with the attached file. ----- Okay, I've just come back to this message after a couple of hours. I've made some more changes. Mask maps are a rabbit hole that takes me in all sorts of directions. Here's what I've done, node by node: - Your original mountains are the same.I didn't change the first combine or the canyonizer. - I clamped your worselands down to 48%. - The second combine is max, 50%, not swapped. - No change to zeroBorders - I added a new erosion node right after zeroBorders, default settings. - I added a fold node next, default settings. - In your erosion node (now erosion2) I increased duration to 10% and reduced river depth to 2%. - Lots of snowfall changes. Duration 16%, intensity 40%, Settle-thaw 25%, melt 10%, slip-off 55°, snow output set to depth mode, no mask. Now pinned as visual underlay. - New tab added for masks. (Details below.) - New tab added for SatMap. Rocky 0065, 12% bias, reversed, post-processed with HSL 15%. DDS file included for overlay. The SlopeMask tab first separates the snowfall output into masks for 0-0.5%, 5-13% and >18% with a 5% fall-off between each. The lowest height range is marked for export, intended to be a mask for terrain below sea level, maybe sand or rocky gravel. The middle height range feeds into slope masks for 0-30°, 30-60°, 60-70°, and 70-90°, good for a progression of materials like grass, forest grass, rocky dirt, loose rocky dirt... basically what you'd expect moving up a slope. The top height range feeds into two slope masks under and over 75°. The steep slopes can be bare rock, and the rest snow cover. Finally, I screen-shot a 3D preview at 2k with a skybox. Play around with this and see what kind of results you get.
I was playing around with weird combinations today, and came up with this circle of peaks. I started out with some artificial-looking circular patterns, then added a Voronoi warp that turned it into a realistic if surreal terrain. Take it, make a world out of it, and see what happens.
