Terrain set a layer to use as an active mask

[Flexman]

Set a layer to work as a mask for creating road, river and shoreline features easily.

 

Would work by selecting a layer, clicking checkbox (use as mask) then going back to your work layer, all terrain painting operations use that selected layer as a mask.

 

To illustrate...

 

Say I had some feature such as a mesa or race track I had a texture and a mask for. But I wanted to use the terrain brushes to quickly model this in the editor. I could load the mask image into one channel, set it as a mask, then the terrain drawing tools would use it to weight the drawing operations.

 

 

or...

 

Flatten an area to create a simple island. Looking at the image below. The mask on the left shows the outline of the shore. Everything in 'red' is effected by editing operations. I flatten or set the value of some procedurally created the terrain and *bing*, instant island with sloping shoreline (if you blur the mask image first).

 

 

You can simply re-purpose existing layers in the editor and use it for textures as you like. Frankly hand drawing decent terrain is a pain. You could also use a mask layer to apply textures, then the applied textures will match the terrain feature. This shouldn't add much extra work and would significantly improve control over editing.

 

For example, in the island example above, without a mask you would have to:

• Procedurally generate the terrain
  
• Flatten the shoreline and sea area by hand.
  
• Hand paint the textures around the sea and beach area
  

 

With a mask you; remove the time spent hand-shaping the shoreline, flattening, painting the sea and beach area. It should be a matter of setting up the mask and applying some operation. Then you use hand-tools for fine-tuning and touching up, adding detail.

 

It doesn't require much more interface work for what you have already, just a check box or drop-down. The tool drawing operations just need to be passed the correct layer and compute the co-ordinates for weighting final output.

[Josh]

I don't understand your description.

[gamecreator]

He'd like to set an image as a mask so that terrain/road/river brushes don't draw outside of it.

[Flexman]

Edited my original post above.

[Josh]

Isn't that sort of backwards? You have to paint the modifications into the paint layer, then you use the sculpt tool to roughly adjust it. Couldn't you just as easily sculpt the island, for example, and then use the height constraint to determine where the sandy textures are? I'm not understanding the major benefit.

[gamecreator]

One thought is to use existing images like the below as masks:

http://aefreemart.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/watercolor_mask.jpg

[Flexman]

Using height constraints gives you just that. It's a blunt instrument. You don't necessarily want the same texture at the same y band everywhere.

 

Should (for whatever obscure reason - and this has happened on more than one occasion) should your editor map file get corrupted and you happen to have the design of your level and all it's features as separate masks (a layer for roads, land-classes, water features, civ layer features). But it's just a suggestion and it seemed like a simple one to implement for additional flexibility. Especially if you work with 3rd party tools which export individual features as masks which would make importing designs a little easier.

 

I guess if nobody else sees the benefit it's not worth arguing for. Features like fill layers are probably more useful.

[beo6]

I don't exactly understand your suggestion too.

 

You can only paint a layer at the points where you want the texture to be used and you can additionally limit it to a specific height with the height constrains.

 

The layer will not be shown everywhere except you paint the whole terrain.

[YouGroove]

@FlexMan :

 

-For roads, you have just to flatten terrain or better use models modular pieces instead ( or let time to LE3 to have some road system some day)

-For river , natural terrain is never regular, you should not have perfect regular height for river borders, so i don't think lot of people will use masks.

Making rivers is not hard really with basic tools, but plaing good vegetation, rocks, making them unique is lot more work.

 

Good game terrain you play on , is made with hard work not only repetitive heights :

 

For your example island, it would be good if you use hieght painting mask to paint inaccessible or non walkable areas, than use a large stroke to sculpt up/down these repetitive areas.

 

I htink what you want is some simple alpha mask for height sculpting finally ?