Terrain imagery

[jkovacich]

I've been digging in just a little bit to UDK and I was curious if there was a way to import an entire level's worth of terrain imagery? For example, in CryEngine, you can import terrain tiles and then paint materials on top of them. With UDK it seems like I set a base material for the whole level and paint different layers on top of it, but the colors are dictated by the texture/material I'm painting with.

I'm pretty sure thats how it needs to be done, I just wanted to make sure, thanks for the help!

[JessieG]

That's the basic way it's done. There's a way I believe to set up the material to change the layers automatically based on the heightmap. Not sure how that's done though.

[jkovacich]

When you say change the layers based on the heightmap, you mean set different materials for different elevation ranges?

My goal would've been to be able to take a picture of my street or a park and use that entire texture as the base layer, but, c'est la vie.

[Monkey-666]

Creating vast landscapes is a relatively pain free thing to do in UDK now. I suggest having a read through this http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Landscape.html

This page http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LandscapeCreating.html Goes into detail about what sizes and format you can use. The actual elevation of a landscape is done via a greyscale image, white being the highest points, black being the lowest.

Then you can use weightmaps which are again, black and white images which determine where the textures you want will be placed upon import. Alternatively you can hand paint all of these. Your gonna need to hand paint bits at some point, but importing weightmaps saves you a lot of time to begin with. You will either have to make your maps in photoshop or similar, or use something like TerreSculptor

These are a good set of videos to get you started

Hope this helps give you an idea of what to do.

[jkovacich]

Yeah man, this is definitely a good start, I appreciate the help.