Hello! I’m a programmer, and for a quite sizable map in our game, we use a lot of terrain.
I have a few questions, involving scale, how to make convincing looking formations, and issues with Terrain LOD.
What are you attempting to achieve?
I’m trying to achieve feasible scaled terrain, however I find the tools frustrating for creating a unique and well-scaled environment that can be believed at a human scale and in first person.
A good amount of the time, the terrain ends up being too large or hard to work with at a smaller scale, leading to a believable from a distance looking terrain, however unnatural at close range and scrutiny
Any tips regarding scale, detailing, and other advice is greatly appreciated!
Additionally, I’m having a more specific issue with the terrain’s LOD system.
From a distance, it is displaying these weird floating chunks of land, that upon closer inspection, obviously do not exist.
Is there any way to re-bake the terrain’s LOD which I assume is saved and downloaded somewhere, or possibly tweak the settings of the LOD system. Thank you.
Terrain is great for rough building, but definitely hard to fine tune for things like gradual slopes or roads. If you use the Terrain tools with their Size and Strength (can’t remember the term used in Studio) set very low you can gradually shave or build up areas.
The Smoothing tool can help, but I’ve found if you use it underwater it’s messy.
If you need a very gradual slope I’d suggest using a Part or Parts for the slope and then change the Color and Texture of the Part to match the surrounding Terrain.
I thought one of the Terrain Properties was the LOD distance… I may be completely wrong.
Terrain currently doesn’t have any LOD properties, as far as I can tell. I am annoyed by the fact that there is nothing I can do to get rid of this extremely odd generation. The voxel system makes it extremely hard to also get it as you described, fine tuned.
Maybe it was in the Workspace or game Settings that I remember seeing something about it…
I’ve also kind of cheated with slopes by taking a steep slope, selecting a box around it, and drag resized the box to spread the slope out a bit. Not always the best way though.
This isn’t about the terrain itself, but about adding details; I would recommend some dead-ish looking shrubs. Maybe even some tumble weed. (if you’re going for that vibe)
for the terrain blur (not rendering the full terrain in the distance) thing that is out in the distance maybe in your sky box / lighting you need fog or change how far the camera can pan out… or create a custom fog … somewhere also I saw a script that would change your field of depth so you can not see things that are far out…
I found the mesh to terrain plug in can help with building terrain… also you can use the mesh below the current surface level, then it might build smaller bumps that are visible .
Thank you for this advice! Although fog would help with this, it is more of a workaround than a solution and is detrimental if, for example, a player needed to see that far. However, I do appreciate your suggestions of using meshes to map terrain, I’ll definitely put that in my toolset!
