Exporting Height Maps and Color Maps for Terrain

Feature Requests Studio Features
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#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to export a terrain map made in Studio as a heightmap and color map. A new feature that just came out talks about how you can generate terrain based on the given height map and a color map. But the problem is (as many have discussed in that topic) that creating the HM (heightmap) and CM (color map) externally, downloading and uploading it to Roblox, waiting for them to pass through moderation just to find out that the terrain doesn’t look as preferred would be a huge disappointment. I understand that the whole point of the Importer is so that developers would not have to create large terrain structures manually (which would be a pain in the neck), but talking small scale, exporting a terrain map is easier than creating and importing them.

If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to quickly save the maps based on the terrain outcome (which would result in more “accurate” and more preferred HMs and CMs), and import it whenever I need it. I would also avoid “The Disappointment” (of waiting for the HM and CM to be uploaded just to find out I do not like the map).

The exported version would act like the “seed” of manually generated terrain, which means that developers can share their (small-scaled) terrain via the exported HM and CM with others so that they have the same map.

Use Case(s)

  1. Selling: This would be great for the Building Public Marketplace and selling creations that involve smooth terrain. After the seller has made their terrain purely in Studio, they would simply be able to get its layout with the export feature. Then they can put the images of the HM and CM inside the model they are selling, and would easily allow the person who bought it to layout the associated terrain.

That is the only use case I thought of so far, feel free to post another use case for this, and I will add it to this topic.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, adding an export-of-terrain feature would allow me and other developers to get the height maps and color maps from their smooth terrain made in Studio. It’'s like the inverse of the Importer, but would prove very useful, especially for small-scale projects. Projects like those would be more logical to create using the Terrain Editor and get their maps rather than to making a HM and CM externally, then importing them.

This is the end of the feature request, thank you for reading through this.

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#4

A better use case would be minor adjustments which are often hard to make in other terrain editors which only offer large scale editing. The biggest issue I see is that it would show cave entrances as simple holes in the ground as heightmaps are only 2 dimensional.

You can actually do this on your own in a way. Cast rays to detect the depth and materials and you can easily generate both a heightmap and a colormap. If you don’t feel like writing a RAW to PNG converter, you can just render it as frame pixels and screenshot the result.

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