Heightmaster - A way to convert heightmaps and texturemaps into terrain

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#12

I have released an update for the plugin which adds some features that I wanted to add a while ago - these being;

  • A toggle to invert the terrain, which could be useful for making caves?

  • A toggle to ‘optimize’ the terrain. This should reduce the occupancy size of each voxel.

  • Changed the colour that the visualiser uses to better fit the actual material colour for the terrain (Before it would just use the colour from the heightmap, which might not give the best idea of what the terrain will look like).

  • A toggle to remove excess terrain (Rather than generating a large chunk of terrain that completely filled, it will generate from the lowest point in the heightmap, hopefully reducing memory size of the terrain). This should hopefully keep the same terrain on the surface.

  • A slider to change the occupancy of the water. (The lower the occupancy, the smoother the transition between land and water will be).

I had tried to implement a method to import heightmaps directly through the plugin using the StudioService:PromptImportFile() and using a Lua PNG DEFLATE method, however, I was having a lot of trouble with it, so I have decided to scrap that for the time being.

10 Likes
#13

mind if i knew what version of java the tool requires to run? running on java 8u201 and java 10u1 runs but exports an empty lua. this occured after the first few times ran and exported incomplete files

#14

Hm, that seems strange. I can’t check right at this moment in time, but I will get back to you on that.

Edit:

I’m having trouble replicating your issue.
Are you using windows? I know that some users have had some issue running the program on a mac.

#15

yep, windows 10. could it be because all i have is 64 bit java?

#16

Is a heightmap texture required, I’m using terrain party and it doesn’t generate a texture, only a heightmap.

#17

Nope a texture is not necessary, you can just assign the heightmap image as the texture when using the application.

You will have to set the Material Mode to Disabled in the plugin however, otherwise things may get a bit funky, but you can choose a smooth terrain material in the Default Material box.

#18

Alright, thanks. This is a really good plugin!

#19

I have followed all the instructions to make it work, but it wont work for me, please help

#20

Could you elaborate a bit on what you’re having trouble with? Alternatively if you send me a DM, I can go into more specifics on how to use the plugin.

#21

I followed everything, and it still says “Please load a heightmap”

1 Like
#22

The heightmaster.jar program doesn’t work for me. I can’t open the program

#23

Bookmarked! This is even better than my tutorial!

#24

Personally I would recommend you to use the official importer instead (It produces a much better quality terrain than this plugin).

With the program itself, make sure you’re running the .jar application, not the .java file, and I’ve heard there were some issues with running the program on non-windows machines. Also make sure you heightmap and colourmap are the same resolution and are both a square.

#25

So much better than the one that Roblox made

3 Likes
#26

Can the official importer import a 4096x4096 heightmap?

1 Like
#27

This is really, really nice. I look forward to using this next time I work on a project.

#28

How good is this compared to the default heightmap importer?

1 Like
#29

As he stated in the post, this might slightly be worse, still worth it as it looks, why did you bump this.

#30

I want to know if this is different from the default importer.

#31

This is not being worked on or supported any more, I would personally recommend you to just use the inbuilt terrain importer, as it does a much better job compared to this plugin. I never managed to figure out how to fix some of the weird artefacts created with terrain using a large scale - the inbuilt importer does not have this issue.
However you are always free to look through the code and make any modifications you wish.