Hello developers!
We are very excited to release a new beta feature, Heightmaps 2. We listened to your feedback, and we think you’re going to love the improvements.
The most important improvement: instant iteration! We worked hard to find a way to make it so that your heightmaps are generated immediately, without having to first import them as an asset and wait for moderation. We’re happy to report that we found a solution, and that means that you can pick a heightmap/colormap from your hard drive, click Generate, and watch your terrain immediately begin appearing!
But we didn’t stop there
We’ve added support for up to 4k (4096 x 4096 pixels) images that generate massive (16k stud) terrain. We also added support for 16-bit PNGs to make it easier to get smooth terrain. Behind the scenes, we significantly improved the generation algorithm so that there is far less terracing, even with 8-bit files.
Furthermore, we made it so that the generated terrain is no longer hollow. It generates a similar biome below-ground structure to terrain made within Studio, which ensures that all of our terrain tools work well, no matter how you created your terrain.
Finally, we overhauled the UI to make it simpler to use and more helpful, with sizing pre-filled based on the heightmap, larger previews of your files, and actionable warning and error messages. We are aware of a text sizing issue that affects some macOS users and have a fix queued up for next week’s release.
How to Enable
To enable this feature, choose File > Beta Features and select Heightmaps 2.
On a technical note, we want to share two bits of information:
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We only read the Red channel of an image for the heightmap data.
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With colormaps, we recommend that you work in sRGB space for best results (we will try to adjust your colormap if it’s not in sRGB), and we have a new RobloxColorMapIndex file available with the correct colorspace and material values that you can download and open in your color-aware-painting-tool of choice to sample from when painting a colormap.
Let us know what you think!