Terrain Splat Maps

[SpiderPig]

Can we assign a splat map / mask to a terrain in the editor rather than painting by hand?  I'd like to use a RGBA map made in world machine that defines four layers.

[Josh]

There is always a way:
https://www.ultraengine.com/learn/Terrain_SetLayerWeight

It should be possible to use that to add an editor extension that does this...

[SpiderPig]

I'll give it a try, thanks. 

[SpiderPig]

Are there any docs relating to creating an extension?

[Josh]

Today is not a great time but we can work this out over the next week. It will probably require some additions in the editor to expose more things to Lua.

[Josh]

I will have some updates tomorrow that expose some new functionality in the editor to help with this.

[Josh]

Okay, you now have access to the terrain material layer list:

listbox = program.terraineditor.materiallist

So you could listen for a WIDGETMENU event and make a popup menu appear when the user right-clicks on an item. That could show a menu that says "Load Splat map" and you could open a file open dialog, load a pixmap, and then apply it to all the selected objects with this:

local sel = program:GetSelection()
for n = 1, #sel do
    local terrain = Terrain(sel[n].entity)
    if terrain ~= nil then
        -- apply splat map here...
    end
end

Maybe you would want to have some menu items like this:

• Load Red Channel...
• Load Green Channel...
• Load Blue Channel...
• Load Alpha Channel...

I'm just thinking of ways to make it handle more than four layers.

On the other hand maybe you want to add a button to just load a splat map onto the first four layers:

local panel = program.terraineditor.panel
local savebutton = panel:FindChild("Save")
local button = CreateButton("Splat", savebutton.position.x + savebutton.size.x, savebutton.position.y, savebutton.size.x, savebutton.size.y, panel)

 

[SpiderPig]

That's terrific thanks!  I'll get into it this week.