Is there any way to import terrain from multiple heightmaps automatically?

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#1

The default heightmap importer from the built-in terrain editor creates decent enough looking terrain. But if you are importing your terrain in chunks it is tedious to do the following for every chunk:

  1. Select the heightmap.
  2. Select the colormap.
  3. Set the position of the chunk.
  4. Click generate.

My current plan is to use 20 chunks so there’s no way I can do this manually every time I want to see how my terrain looks ingame while I iterate on it.

I am wondering if there is any way I can automate the above process.
I see that there is a service called HeightmapImporterService. Maybe this is what the terrain importer uses on the backend but all the methods are only available to core scripts. Is it possible to run a script with core permissions?

I’ve also tried to look at the source code for the built-in plugin so I could take out what I need. But trying to insert the TerrainEditor.rbxm model located in Roblox\Versions\version-latest\BuiltInPlugins\ gives me a “The file is corrupted” error. I read somewhere that this is possibly an attempt by Roblox to hide the source code of their plugins.
image

Any ideas?

#2

Pretty sure you can’t.

Make your own heightmap importing pipeline:

Save your heightmap as a raw greyscale bitmap using GIMP or w/e, open it in a text editor and copy/paste it into a ModuleScript between return [[ and ]]. That way you can get your data as a string in a Lua script in Studio. Then decode that string somehow. If 8 bit “color” depth is enough for your use case, you can just do it char by char. Otherwise you’ll have to figure out how to read the data in a non-char-aligned way. Finally use normal terrain editing API to generate terrain from the height map.