I mean if I were to add the heightmap into an already existing map, to maybe add a mountain onto an already existing landscape using a heightmap, would the heightmap erase all the terrain that collides with the bounding box? Or would it create the mountain on the landscape and merge the terrain together?
It will merge them together. We first read the target area, apply our changes from the importer, then write it back to the terrain. Any air voxels made by the importer will not overwrite your existing terrain.
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Really cool, but using this can make some really unholy things, such as the discord profile picture that my big brother uses.
Then again, it could also be used to make some beautiful things for games. Thank you!
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This is an excellent update, especially the filled terrain.
On the subject 16k terrain…
Are there any loading optimizations planned?
It’d be amazing for one of my games to be able to load in large maps but the biggest I can realistically go is 6k-8k before match loading takes too long. Not sure how the voxel loading works internally but is there any current multithreading or gpu acceleration that could be potentially implemented?
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We’re continuously working to better-optimize our system, especially with large experiences. Did you see the recent City People Cars tech demo we released? New Tech Demo: City People Cars
Also, as you build large experiences, I’d encourage you to file bugs (if you’re not already) when you encounter issues. Generally the more we know an issue is affecting our devs, the higher priority it will be to fix.
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@Phoninian gave a good explanation. Hollowing out terrain decreases memory usage significantly.
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It would be great if there was an option to enable having the terrain hollow, to reduce memory usage, it was the best feature the terrain importer had for me
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I am somewhat mad this wasn’t done a long time ago (since this feature existed as a beta at some point), but I seriously love the improvements. I previously had to manually spend hours smoothing out large maps just because of how heavy the terracing and how low the resolution was.
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I’m glad we were able to address your issues. We are also hiring, as we have a lot we want to do and need more great engineers, designers, and product managers 
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This is incredible and I see it as revolutionary! I personally haven’t gotten too much into terrain, but when I have used it that was something I was hoping for an improvement for. Keep up the good work and don’t stop with these good ideas!
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heightmaps really are a necessity for revolutionary terrain design. Thank you so much for this!
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This is so much better than the previous workflow for terrain heightmaps. I ended up choosing CloneTrooper’s reimplementation simply due to the requirement for heightmaps having to pass through moderation before they could be used.
I love that it now fills in the terrain, but one thing I’d like to see is the option for us to customise how it fills it.
Use case: I currently use several heightmaps to get more detail in my exported heightmaps, (without using 16-bit PNGs since what I export from doesn’t support that) but this means that I am left with layering that I don’t really want.
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This is an interesting use case–we’ll need to think about it. FYI, try the terrain material search and replace tool to clean that up quickly.
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Also I have another feature request. Can you make it so that you don’t have to put it through moderation to put heightmaps? I find that it really takes a long time to just import a heightmap.
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Try the new feature–we worked very closely with trust & safety to provide instant iteration so that you don’t have to wait for moderation before using your heightmap.
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Ok guys, I made the showcase:
wait dont join there is a bug i am fixing it
EDIT: fixed the bug
EDIT: Why are there so many dislikes on this game lol.
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Roblox doesn’t store voxels individually, it groups them based on material and occupancy. I just did a test where 2 scripts generate a 5120x512x5120 grass cuboid, one making it hollow at the bottom and the other filling it in. The hollow one took up 228MB of memory, while the filled one took up 19MB.
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Since terrain height maps are hard to find or sometimes hard to use, maybe there could be a pre-set or the ability to give certain terrain creators the ability to upload custom height maps like how only certain people can upload videos? 
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Indeed. In most scenarios hollow terrain is more expensive than filled terrain not only in terms of disk space but also runtime cost because hollow terrain has twice the physics collision complexity.
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