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Handcrafted Heightmap

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:06 am
by Freak2121
Like two years ago I started work on sort of a manually retouched heightmap for Daggerfall, loosely based off of the travel map. I added mountain and valley details based on what I saw on the travel map, but I didn't touch any other parts of the heightmap, making it kinda weird and inconsistent. Today I went over it again for 5-6 hours and added a lot more details on the non-mountainous regions of the map. The base file is 16000x8000 to make working on it easier, but 2000x1000 should show all the details well. I don't think DFU has support for larger heightmaps yet though, so here it is at the original resolution with the vanilla heightmap and travel map to compare:


Travel Map:

Image

Update:

Image

Vanilla:

Image

I'm very curious how it'll look in-game. Is there anyone here who could teach me how to change the heightmap in Daggerfall Unity? I don't want to be a bother, always asking someone to do the work for me.

Re: Handcrafted Heightmap

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 7:52 am
by VMblast
@Freak2121
This is some awesome work!
Btw, I followed you're project on the realistic height map, but why did you stop working on it? It showed a great potential. ;)

PS - With the new Unity 2018 you can add multiple terrain patches now (and stitch them together). For the DFU map of 12288pix, devided into chunks of 6x2048 and 3x200048, would be enough to pull out all the juicy details. :P

Re: Handcrafted Heightmap

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:55 am
by Freak2121
The eroded height-map is just a lot of work and unless I can actually see results from it to tweak it, it's really not worth getting into in the mean time. I really know nothing about programming or scripting so I'm relying on other people putting in the time to implement things, and terrain is a pretty low priority thing that I'd rather not have people waste their time on when they have better things to do. This one should be a straight-forward replacement of the original heightmap though, if only I knew how to go about it.

Re: Handcrafted Heightmap

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 10:48 am
by VMblast
Freak2121 wrote: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:55 am The eroded height-map is just a lot of work and unless I can actually see results from it to tweak it, it's really not worth getting into in the mean time. I really know nothing about programming or scripting so I'm relying on other people putting in the time to implement things, and terrain is a pretty low priority thing that I'd rather not have people waste their time on when they have better things to do. This one should be a straight-forward replacement of the original heightmap though, if only I knew how to go about it.
Yeah this hand-painted replacement is great stuff and will be a huge boost and hopefully great transition towards that -eroded- terrain map.

As I recall Gavin (Interkarma) said that eventually he will migrate DFU to the U2018, he is just waiting stable version to do so. Ones DFU is on the 2018, patched terrain option will be available. Software like World Machine supports patched map export, so testing between WM and U2018 would be fast and easy (applying maps to the designated terrain patches).