Already asked but not answered so here I am again.
Does ROBLOX keep track of the imported heightmap images?
I’m eager for this feature to be restored; I teach Roblox Studio at schools, and Terrain is by far the most popular lesson with the students. I’ve shown them a few of my own heightmaps, and they want to create their own now. Please make this a priority!
6 Likes
After seeing the V2 version (literally need to type in the asset IDs), I can clearly see how nobody will be using this and how the currently existing plugins will keep their reign. Good luck with your future projects Roblox.
This isn’t even an issue of it being hard to type in the ID. I don’t understand why I’m supposed to upload anything to Roblox just to create a heightmap terrain. If you are afraid that we will create something inappropriate, then you can as well deprecate parts, meshes, decals and anything that can be used as a shape of any form. Why also not remove the ability to manipulate the terrain in game?
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I don’t like how we have to upload our heightmap images to Roblox to “verify” them that they aren’t innapropriate.
This doesn’t stop an average person to use two or more images to create an innapropriate terrain figure.
This also lets anyone find your heightmap image easily so they can use it in their own game without our permission.
Heightmaps are a good thing, but having us upload the heightmap to the site for verification is very useless and can be very easily bypassed.
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I agree, having to upload a heightmap isn’t good. I often have to create many heightmap iterations before I can get it right. Especially when its a learning process. On top of that I was happy that my heightmaps were private. I could keep it closed source. That keeps my game unique. If this is true, I’ll no longer have the security of using the heightmap importer. It makes the entire feature redundant.
I’d be better off using the terrain tools which is giving me all of the trouble in the first place allowing me to look forward to a feature like this. As other people have said. People are gonna make inappropriate things with the terrain regardless. Adding the checks and balances to the heightmap upload in order to combat that is one thing. But punishing the people who don’t is another.
I hope @Roblox reflect on these changes. If not I’ll have no choice but to rely on the advanced terrain tools, attempt to use the broken tools that already exist, or create my own solution. A broken workflow, a process that impedes my workflow. That doesn’t empower my imagination.
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Heightmaster is a decent alternative to this: Heightmaster - A way to convert heightmaps and texturemaps into terrain
1 Like
Heightmaster does not allow you to create MASSIVE terrain like the official importer does.
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Can we get a response from devrel as to why exactly it has to go through moderation now? Don’t we have place moderation for this? Seems redundant 
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The most interesting part is that the heightmaps can be enormous and Roblox has image size limits, so I have no idea how they’ll pull it off with it being more versatile than the current plugins.
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They got lucky with optimization
Im saying that you can’t create something out of nothing. I don’t know the exact limits, but you can’t make a 4000x4000 out of a 2000x2000 (probably around 1024). Upscaling it will give you something that has more pixels carrying the same information.
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This is amazing! Thank you so much!!
Don’t get too excited. With the current image upload limits Roblox imposes (because they decided to moderate this), the heightmap importer is no better than the already existing plugins.
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If you have to turn on a flag to use it, it’s not officially released yet and so they are not open to bug reports about it.
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YES YES AND YES, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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Wow we seriously have to upload them as a decal now?
I made a really high resolution terrain map because it was going to be meant for a gigantic map, it this point I’d rather use a plug-in that does this instead.
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As someone who was actively excited to use this for my projects, I have to admit that I’m disappointed by the requirement that our assets are treated as decals.
In the screenshots that I posted in my most recent reply, I generated my map using a 3500x2000 resolution image (7 million pixels) and turned them into 112 million studs worth of terrain. As of right now, Roblox scales decals down to only 1K by 1K pixels.
I understand the need to ensure that this feature is not abused to allow users to circumvent the moderation system entirely by generating inappropriate content rather than uploading it, but unless and until Roblox significantly increases the maximum decal resolution, this feature is effectively useless for the developers who’d make the most out of it. To generate terrain from images, I previously relied on a basic program I wrote in Java that iterates over an image’s pixels & puts their colors into a table. I was thrilled that Roblox was making a sort of image-to-terrain converter into a native feature, but if there’s significant limitations on the quality of the maps we can create, I don’t know how useful it’s going to be.
If I can only generate 1K pixels at a time, I’m better off going back to my original importing method. I would like to emphasize that, for moderation purposes, it’s actually important that developers and hobbyists don’t feel the need to seek out or create alternatives to the built-in heightmap importer, as these manual generation methods cannot be moderated.
I understand that this feature still hasn’t been officially re-released, but I really hope that Roblox takes into consideration the concerns we have with a decal-based heightmap/colormap importer prior to the release. If Roblox were to increase the size limit & allow our moderated heightmaps to be private (rather than public decals which anyone could use), then this feature would be perfect, but I am worried that it might be necessary for developers to continue to rely on unmoderated third-party tools in order to generate high-quality maps.
TL;DR: it would be greatly appreciated if our images don’t get scaled down to 1Kx1K pixels
24 Likes
Setting your inventory to private should prevent anyone from being able to use your height map decals shouldn’t it?
Has this been disabled? I opened up studio to test this out today and I have no Import tab under the terrain editor… could it be that studio has not updated correctly or what?
The feature is currently disabled.
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