UE3 - UT3 Create terrain in Max or UTeditor?
- Thread starter Nogert
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Creating terrain in a 3rd party 3D package is a waste of time. The closest you should come to this is importing a height map you created in Photoshop.
Creating terrain features is another story though...
Creating terrain features is another story though...
Technically it's possible but it would require a really huge texture and collission calculations would be extremely complex.
Simply put: Use the built in terrain actor.
Simply put: Use the built in terrain actor.
If you were sincerely desperate to make terrain in 3dsmax, for example if you had some truly award-winning awesome terrain-generation plugin or had some pre-existing terrain in a scene you'd made for some other reason and were just itching to port it across, then you could always export it to ASE and then use a fairly trivial script in your preferred scripting language to convert it to a heightmap image ~ perl would do nicely.
Otherwise see above: nooooooooooo, just use the terrain editor.
Otherwise see above: nooooooooooo, just use the terrain editor.
Just for the hell of it, here's some proof-of-concept code I bashed together this afternoon in PHP that will take an ASE file and export it to a PGM file.
Here's an editable patch that I started with in 3dsmax:
And here's the greymap I created with the script:
Ok that's just a crap example with a 48x48 patch but you get the idea The script doesn't do any interpolation so it helps if the mesh you're converting is exactly the same or slightly higher res than the greymap you want to create, as any pixels that don't have a heightmap will get a mid grey value. Of course you can get around that by just applying subdivide or mesh smooth before you export
Usage is basically:
php ase2pgm.php [filename] {optional_texture_size} {optional_object_name}
so you need PHP on your system but it's a tiny download. Texture size defaults to 256, if you don't specify an object name it will just use all vertices in the scene which is fine if you just exported the one object you want to convert. Black will be the lowest Z value in your scene, and white the highest, X and Y coords are scaled to fit (so it may stretch if your mesh in non-square).
There's little to no error checking or anything in the script so it may not work but it's just to show what's possible if you put your mind to it.
EDIT: Note that you can't import PGM directly into UEd but you can import it into pretty much any program that exists. I just used PGM for simplicity
Here's an editable patch that I started with in 3dsmax:
And here's the greymap I created with the script:
Ok that's just a crap example with a 48x48 patch but you get the idea
The script doesn't do any interpolation so it helps if the mesh you're converting is exactly the same or slightly higher res than the greymap you want to create, as any pixels that don't have a heightmap will get a mid grey value. Of course you can get around that by just applying subdivide or mesh smooth before you export Usage is basically:
php ase2pgm.php [filename] {optional_texture_size} {optional_object_name}
so you need PHP on your system but it's a tiny download. Texture size defaults to 256, if you don't specify an object name it will just use all vertices in the scene which is fine if you just exported the one object you want to convert. Black will be the lowest Z value in your scene, and white the highest, X and Y coords are scaled to fit (so it may stretch if your mesh in non-square).
There's little to no error checking or anything in the script so it may not work but it's just to show what's possible if you put your mind to it.
EDIT: Note that you can't import PGM directly into UEd but you can import it into pretty much any program that exists. I just used PGM for simplicity
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