That is not realistic, that looks weird, very weird. You’d probably pull off a better piece of work with parts. Try out parts before you try making a building out of smooth terrain. But again, I’m expressing my opinion.
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I’m sorry if the caps went a bit wrong there, I clearly did not intend to mean that in a bad way.
But the main thought is, that you should try with bricks first and see how that goes. Painting terrain works too.
Everyone has their own taste right? Personally, I like the idea, it gives me a nostalgic trip to building with stamper tools.
But anyway if the community does not want a structural-terrain system then I will not continue to press on it
Terrain is…terrain? It’s meant to be dynamic, changing in texture, shape, and dynamics based on loads of different stuff.
This is very impractical to use. Very. Using it for cobblestone road outlines, or even as a wall is one thing, but as a replacement for parts? Doesn’t really work.
Reminder that you can make meshes, and then apply your own textures to them, which then creates something a bit more unique that CSG and Roblox default textures.
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Smooth Terrain isn’t meant for replacement of parts on a building.
If you still feel the want to use it for buildings you do you. but it isn’t the best option.
ROBLOX did think about shipping APIs to give developers more control over the LOD system, but as of right now I don’t think theres anything available yet. 
ah damn, i guess too bad for me then 
Yea. I would prefer just building with regular parts. I’m pretty sure you can find the same terrain textures and apply them the parts if you want the same/similar look.
Hmm, I never really thought of doing that. Good idea 
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That LOD system appears to be adding more triangles than it removes - which is counter productive I think. 
Anyways, on the topic of Smooth Terrain & instead using parts for buildings, the Terrain materials look a bit nicer & more realistic than the part materials. If anything, Roblox should add in the Smooth Terrain materials to part materials - but that might defeat the purpose of smooth terrain. In general, you’ll want to create buildings out of parts - since they can be skinnier, and you can also rotate them quite easily. The same smooth-terrain textures can be applied to parts, but they may appear to be washed out due to specular maps not working, and the simple fact they’re squished down by Roblox.
Smooth terrain in general has never really been good for anything, due to the clunkiness of the tools making it impossible to create realistic-looking terrain, unless you want to spend a few hours scuplting a single part of the terrain. I’ve found that using a part to terrain converter is quite good to solve this issue. Though, classic terrain tools were a bit better since you were able to create mountains quickly.
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The LOD system doesn’t add more triangles. I think what its doing there is just morphing the pillars into one basic shape that takes a lot less to render than each pillar individually.
Stretching the terrain upwards towards the pillars in theory adds more triangles.
If you have 18 triangles for three pillars for instance, and you have a base that’s a wedge basically, that’s an extra 6 triangles to render, not to mention if it’s like that all around, it’s 12 extra triangles. Not that much of a performance hit, but it still makes the terrain ugly for something that doesn’t even do it’s intended purpose in the first place.
Of course, it could just be grabbing triangles from below so it doesn’t actually create new triangles, but it still appears to add more. which on very low end devices, every triangle counts, which could be a problem.
I’m pretty sure it replaced the pillars with a more basic shape. I’m honestly not sure how the terrain LOD works, but I doubt ROBLOX would use it if it wasn’t improving performance.
How do you get more basic than a rectangle?
Unless it’s removing faces behind the camera, which would make more sense I think.
Yea but theres multiple rectangles there, so it combines them into one mesh. Thats why you see it all clumped and when you get closer its more accurate.
This is due to how voxels are calculated based on the neighbouring voxel - I will admit that it’s odd how Concrete bleeds into Brick, and not how they both mix at the middle.
Rounding errors are always present when you’re dealing with a metaball-esque structure, and Smooth Terrain noise has always been a problem, unfortunately. Not much you can do with this besides write code that clears out voxels that are less than X full.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, that’s the terrain LoD. You want it, as ugly as it can be. Smooth Terrain would be terrible without it.
I tried this. While it looks ok, it wasn’t very optimized and required a lot of work to achieve.
If you’re referring to how the LoD system chunks Smooth Terrain together, it’s much more efficient than not having it (it’s why it isn’t optional to disable). Smooth Terrain uses a chunking system that you can visually see if you export it into 3D software. It’s 100% meant to take up the least amount of memory - and it achieves this well considering the size it can be.
And finally @ everyone saying that it’s not recommended to use Smooth Terrain for building structures due to it looking bad: it’s a style choice and if your opinion is against the style, don’t bother sharing it here because it doesn’t help the OP. This isn’t a debate.
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Thanks for the explanation of the LOD system - I actually didn’t know how it handled the terrain chunks. 
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Amazing explanation, thanks for the help 
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How did you make those cool shapes in the first picture, did Roblox release an update to what you can do in smooth terrain?
They’re meshes I made with a grass Texture object (for the tiling funtion - not to be confused with the MeshPart’s TextureId proerty which doesn’t tile) that I ripped from the grass Smooth Terrain material.
It was for a proof of concept, they are in no way optimized for an actual game. In fact I highly recommend against them.
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