Heightmaps Go to New Altitudes!

I made a new showcase too.

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For the colormaps I’ve made, my workflow is:

  1. Open the color-correct file linked in the post for reference
  2. Open my heightmap in Photoshop (or sophisticated editor of your choice)
  3. Make a new layer. I temporarily lower the opacity in the layer so that I can see the structure underneath.
  4. Sample the color I want for the base material and fill the layer with that base color.
  5. Set my brush to have a completely hard edge
  6. Sample/resize my brush/paint as-needed to put the other materials in.
  7. Delete the background layer, set the colormap layer to 100%, and save the colormap with an sRGB profile.

I pinged some folks internally in case they have a moment to share their tips with you, too.

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If you wanted too, you can take a picture of your Minecraft world [Camera facing down] and import it :rofl:

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@JoshSedai This update is amazing! Finally I can now span through height maps without needing to wait for moderation aswell as it just being nicer out of the gate.

I have a single question though, When do you think we will have smoother transitions from Normal terrain to water terrain?
heres a photo for an example

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I know this isnt really a high priority request, but speaking for the whole GFX community

It would be great if smoothterrain from studio would export with a vertex map for each type of material

As it is right now, smoothterrain is almost unusable for GFX because of the time it takes to paint out the materials by hand

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We have it in the backlog. There’s an underlying engine issue that needs to be fixed, and we’re aware of the impact.

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This is a VERY HUGE update for Roblox studio and it will really make terrain design easier. I am sure many developers will use it. One thing I would suggest is adding a couple of premade materials, for example, noise textures and such, just to make it easier for people who struggle to find/make their own.

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This is an amazing and efficient update for terrain artists and builders alike. Designers can now import entire islands in a matter of seconds. I’m blown away by this new update and hope to see many more in the future!

Kudos to the ROBLOX Engineering Team on this. :star2:

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Now this is good, I have been using hightmaps for a while(trying atleast) and now I can do it:
image Wasnt a 4k image so it was not as high quality.

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Great update! Prior to now, the only real way to use heightmaps without waiting hours for moderation was with time consuming workarounds, so I’m glad that issue was fixed.

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As someone who ended up reimplementing the PNG file format in Lua just to restore the original functionality of the importer out of spite, I’m happy to turn a new leaf on the heightmap importer. Thank you guys for hearing us out and making it even better than it was before!

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Thanks for this amazing update! It is really useful to us developers using smooth terrain. I just got one thing I always wanted studio to have. Faster ‘smooth’ tool in terrain editor.

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So awesome! I grabbed a chunk of the grand canyon right quick, imported, exploring within 2 minutes, start to finish:


Edit, another:

Edit, another:
This is too much fun, I’ll stop now, last one, promise:

edit:
If you’d like to try it, warning its laggy for a minute after you spawn, give it some time, then its not bad…
https://www.roblox.com/games/6410195728/Grand-Canyon-terrain-test-flight

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This update looks incredible! I am looking forward to seeing where this update will go and how it is going to improve. I will also be looking forward to all the incredible terrain that games will have generated with this new update!

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This is a great step, though, I feel like adding the “Generate hollow” as an option would be a great addition to this beta feature.

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Thank your roblox for this! This is definitely going to help me!

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Good job! Seems really great to see heightmaps brought to the next level!

Still a request as always, could we be able to toggle if we want terrain fill or not? This is needed if an enormous map is created (to reduse voxels)

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As seen earlier in this thread, hollow terrain is actually more intensive than filled terrain, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

Hey guys!

there is close to zero benefit of a hollow terrain. Hollow terrain actually creates more geometry that has to be rendered (at least the vertices has to be). So runtime of hollow terrain is actually slower.
Storage wise the hollow terrain makes small difference. However the runtime RAM memory usage is higher, that is true. We do not really recommend unnecessary hollow terrain and probably won’t endorse that in our own importer :slight_smile:

Ad the complain about slow load time. Yes that is due to terrain. Some legacy code was not optimized for loading of large terrain and we are planning to redo this pretty soon. I don’t wanna promise, but there is no reason for terrain to load 40seconds. Pretty sure that we can fix that. Don’t get me wrong :slight_smile: … it will still take some time to load, but it is not going to freeze the game like it is doing right now.

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