Terrain - Shaping Up

Now that I've started putting down the basics for the terrain system I find myself spending most of my free time working on its integration.

To be precise, that means that I am not spending much time on it because the editor has a lot of areas needing some love. Still, I made enough progress to warrant a blog post.

First of all, the terrain in itself. You can create as many as your RAM can take and they are just like any other item in the scene. They can be moved around, scaled or rotated as you please. Infinite terrain or paged terrain should be a piece of cake to implement. The only real challenge is going to be the clustering of the world (eg. moving the world origin in order to keep things in a range where floats don't blow out of precision). This is something that should require a good amount of thinking in order to be provided as a generic system.

But anyway, editing terrain(s) is done by selecting it (or them as usual) and accessing the relevant tabs in the property dock. First is the terrain itself.

Of course this will see some changes before it gets fully functional. But in its current state it's already useful to a certain amount. The Tools dropdown menu contains tools such as clear, import or filter the heightmap.

The terrain materials are configured using layers.

Now, this one is definitively going to change a lot. There's just nothing yet. The most notably missing configuration options are: per-layer UV scale, UV rotation (to put some variation in the tiling) and normal, specular and self-illumination textures...

Finally, the last thing we want to see is a terrain with no collision. Well, collisions are supported and at no additional memory cost. So, creating a terrain and dropping the 'Viper Car' sample onto it gives about this: