Heightfield export LWO

[digitalguru]

Hi, I'm in the stages of setting up a pipeline to import Terragen terrains into Maya using some mel scripts. I'm using the Heightfield export LWO to start with and that works fine on a first pass, exporting to LWO format before converting to obj to bring into Maya, but if I try it a second time, the scale changes - it looks like the first pass is the actual size of the terrain (8km - translating to 8000 units in Maya) and the second time it's the size of the terrains resolution (in this case a 512 terrain and imports at 512 scene units)

If I save the scene and open it again, it's the correct size again for one export only. Just wondering if this is a bug or something I'm missing in the export process. I've attached the scene and a screen grab of my node setup.

I know you can export terrains via the micro exporter and they are able to capture more detail and don't have the size limitations of the LWO export, but I want something simple for the first setup of the terrain in Maya and don't necessarily want to setup a bake camera at this stage.

[Oshyan]

Your network does not appear to be configured properly. You're loading a heightfield and then trying to convert that into a heightfield (using heightfield from shader), which doesn't really make sense or seem necessary; instead you can just attach the Heightfield Export LWO directly to your Heightfield Load 01 (delete the Heightfield From Shader). Also note the heightfield from shader node is largely deprecated at this point (included for compatibility and legacy reasons); essentially the same functionality can be had using the Shader input of a Heightfield Generate node (though it's not needed here).

That being said I do strongly suggest you look at the micro exporter instead at this point. It's better developed and is likely to give you fewer problems, not least of which is it outputs to OBJ so the tiling of LWO is not necessary.

- Oshyan

[digitalguru]

Thanks for your reply Oshyan,

I was trying to think ahead with the heightfield from shader node, so anything that updated the topology of the terrain could be output. I had the backend of the conversion into Maya scripted so that wasn't a problem.
The heightfield generate works just as well, but with the same issues re scale changing until the scene re-loads - not a huge problem really and just exploring a simple pipeline into Maya at the moment so it's all flexible. The lwo option just seemed to create a cleaner mesh and a relatively simple process to export to get something into Maya to block with.

[Oshyan]

Fair enough, what works best for your particular needs is what matters. As to the scale issue, I don't know why that might be occurring. I'll try to have a dev look at this thread and see if there's anything they can come up with. I don't have another decent 3D app that I know how to use to verify the issue, to be honest.

- Oshyan

[digitalguru]

No worries, thanks for looking