How does Terrain paint work?

Editor
#1

I cannot remove layers by pressing the ctrl key. Also, for example, while I can repaint with layer1 a place I painted with layer2, I cannot repaint with layer1 a place I painted with layer4. In order to do this, I need to clean the region with layer 7, which I did not assign any texture, and then use layer1. This is so annoying. So I can’t assign texture to layer7. In addition while doing such a cleaning process, the corners of the layer become pixelated.

In short, I couldn’t understand how this thing works.

Are there two main layer/colormaps as 0->3 and 4->7?

Finally; Is it possible to use more than 8 texture?

layers
layers1484×796 172 KB

#2

Terrain supports up to 8 splatmap channels (2 splatmap textures, each with RGBA so 2x4 = 8 channels). It all depends the actual usage in the material since you can for instance have 9th layer if a surface has both Layer 0 and Layer 1,

However there is a known bug that painting over one splatmap won’t clear other splatmap (eg. painting over Layer 7 won’t clear Layer 0/1/2/3 channels) - will need to fix it.

1 Like
#3

lol. I exported the splatmaps in SceneData/Scene/Terrain to be able to clean and repaint the splatmaps. After cleaning, I re-imported. I encountered a lot of errors. While I was trying to fix it, my island demo is completely broken. Now, It’s not completely broken, but now I need to recreate the terrain/level.

Alright. A new question: Can we make splatmaps larger than 512x512? For some reason some layers become very pixelated. It looks very bad.

Even if I choose a 2048x2048 external map while creating the terrain, they become 512x512 in “SceneData/Scene/Terrain” after they are imported. Sometimes they can be 1024X1024. I don’t understand how the editor decides.

I also want to make a suggestion. It would be great if we could easily access the splatmaps from Terrain properties in the editor, and export it when necessary. For example, I could use a blur effect in an external editor for the areas that become pixelated when the painting is finished. Then I could re-import it. Or I could delete the undeletable layers in the map to fix the interlayer problem caused by the bug. (For example, to be able to paint over layer6 with layer3)

Another suggestion: I noticed that when I delete a terrain from the project, its remains in the “SceneData/Scene/Terrain” folder are not deleted. They just take up space. I think it would be better if they were deleted automatically when the terrain is deleted. Because a small terrain contains 20MB files.

Thanks for reply btw.

#4

Splatmaps resolution is related to actual terrain resolution so if you set it for higher vertex density, then splatmap will be larger.

Yeah tooling for terrain could be improved. I added your suggestions to the roadmap.

1 Like
#5

Hello again. Thank you very much for adding my suggestions to the roadmap.

I have one more question. So how do I change the vertex density? with chunk size? If I choose chunk size 255, the splatmap is indeed created at 1024x1024 resolution for each chunk. But there is no option higher than 255. Is there no way to make 2048x2048?

#6

You can scale the terrain :smiley: For example if you set terrain scale to 0.5 it will have 2x higher density of vertices per world unit.

1 Like
#7

Oh i get it! Thanks!

#8

Terrain painting has been fixed to properly work with multiple layers: Fix terrain painting. by MineBill · Pull Request #1739 · FlaxEngine/FlaxEngine · GitHub (sorry for delay)