Export Terrain Materials with Heightmap

[par]

Is there an easy way to export a material set for a given generated terrain?  Basically, I am very impressed with what I can do with the shaders on making the terrain "look" the way I want.  But I would love to not only export a heightmap but also all of the painted terrain materials as well.

I did a search in both the forums and on Google and cannot find anything like this.  I might be stating what I want in the wrong fashion though... I'm a developer not an artist so my "art lingo" is lacking greatly.

Along with this, I couldnt find an easy way to export the heightfield as a grayscale heightmap.  What I ended up doing was "saving" the generated heightfield as a terrain file and then using the "TerraConv" program to make it a tif file.  It works, but not very efficient.

Thanks!

PAR

[Oshyan]

Texture export is not currently supported. The best thing you can do for now is to render a top-down view of the terrain with an orthographic camera and use the resulting image as a texture map on your terrain. If you can eliminate lighting and atmospheric effects, you can get a decent texture out of this, but getting enough resolution for meaningful detail can be difficult due to the memory required for large image renders.

You can also save your terrains directly into OpenEXR format, which can be read by many image editors and viewers. There is a Photoshop plugin for EXR.

- Oshyan

[par]

... The best thing you can do for now is to render a top-down view of the terrain with an orthographic camera and use the resulting image as a texture map on your terrain. If you can eliminate lighting and atmospheric effects, you can get a decent texture out of this, but getting enough resolution for meaningful detail can be difficult due to the memory required for large image renders.

Thank you very much for such a quick reply.  I had actually attempted to do what you mention above but the tutorial I had was for an older version of Terragen 2 (or at least one in which the instructions made no sense).

Would it be too much to hope that I could ask for a quick step-by-step tutorial in doing what you suggest?

Thank you very much!

PAR

[Henry Blewer]

Blender supports OpenEXR. Blender can also export the height field with the image map added in many different formats.

[Oshyan]

The fundamental concepts and process are simple, but getting good results is difficult unfortunately. Basically all you need to do is put your camera straight above the terrain you're exporting, aim it down at the ground -90 degrees, and do a square render. Orthographic camera would work best, or you can get your camera really far away then zoom in to the area you want to capture. This will reduce distortion.

To get best results you'll want to turn off the atmosphere, and use lighting that is as neutral as possible. Then render at as high a resolution as you can, start with something like 2000x2000 pixels. You'll probably need a good deal more than that but your system's RAM may not support it. Worth trying though. You could also try rendering in separate crops. For this kind of render you won't need GI or much antialiasing either so I'd turn GI off and AA down to something like 3.

That should get you a start, at least to see if it's even workable for your needs.

- Oshyan