showmethatagain : new UDK terrain texturing tutes

[ultramedia]

PLEASE NOTE : --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These tutes are no longer online and I will not be re uploading them as they are too far out of date.
If the wind blows me back in this direction (making tutes for UDK) I'll post links here at polycount.

Until then showmethatagain.com is on hold indefinitely, as I'm flat out with other projects at the moment.

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Hi Everyone,

After many many hours slogging away at night and on weekends, I've *finally* managed to finish off my UDK terrain texturing tutorial set, woohoo :)

All together they add up to nearly three hours of video, which is long I know, but I had a list of things I wanted to cover and I decided to go for 'comprehensive' over 'compact'. Not that I cover everything there is to know in this area, that would take ten times longer again. But hopefully - if you make through all of them ;) - you will at least feel a great deal more comfortable in the material editor in UDK (and have a nice terrain material to boot).

To make it a bit easier to go through, I have published them in sections this time so that people can pick and choose which bits they watch. Just be aware/forewarned that each section follows on from the previous section with it's content and assumptions about what you know. Like the preceding tutorials, I'm making these tutes available for free (my web hosting *should* be able to handle the traffic, if it starts to struggle I might have to look at some other options).

Ok so anyway, on with business, here are the tutes:

Previous tutes
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/intro/ : intro, setting up a new project (40 mins, 111MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain01/ : large terrains in UDK from sat maps (30 mins, 84MB)

The new tutes :)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain02/ : manual terrain editing (20 mins, 60MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain03/ : creating terrain textures (30 mins, 66MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain04/ : basic material creation and control (28 mins, 63MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain05/ : blending between materials (14 mins, 32MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain06/ : blending based on distance (20 mins, 45MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain07/ : blending based on slope (14 mins, 32MB)
http://www.showmethatagain.com/videos/UDK/terrain08/ : normal and detail maps (25 mins, 77MB)

[cholden]

Cool man! More great information. Thanks for sharing.

[salman_fas]

Thanks for sharing. I was looking for something like this.

[Minos]

Very nice, thanks!

[roosterMAP]

thx! these will come in handy!

[Zipfinator]

Sounds great! Will definitely come in handy when I finally start learning UDK.

[Christian Hjerpe]

Fantastic! Just started with the terrain part of UDK so this is perfect.
Thanks!

[Jakol]

Seam links have gone dead.

[tristamus]

Links are dead =[

[ambershee]

Doesn't really matter - UDK uses 'Landscape' instead of Terrain these days, so the tutorial content would no longer really be useful.

[odd_enough]

No, the tutorial content is still actually useful, notably the material blending tuts. I remember watching them when they were still up. Would definitely carry over to the new system.

[ultramedia]

Hey guys, apologies for the dead links, I got massively hacked last year and still haven't really recovered from it (so far as finding the time to rebuild my websites is concerned).

I actually redid all my videos for a class I taught since then, unfortunately at the time I ran into problems with collision on landscape that I couldn't fix so I went with the old terrain system again.

The problem with this is that one of the most significant differences between the old terrain system and the new landscape system is the way you do materials on them. I just checked through my videos and as much as it pains me to say it (took me over a 100 hrs to reauthor them) I think everyone should be moving forward with landscape not rehashing the old terrain system in my video tutes.

Adding to the bad news, I'm actually taking a break from UDK. I spent months trying to build an effective grass workflow only to have UDK fight me tooth and nail every step of the way, in the end I just got sick of having to do so much work to do something that other engines had built in by default and could do easily with a swipe of the mouse. And as a final kick in the guts, the same day I finally got it to a point I was happy with, 3Dmotive lauched their foliage video tute which is basically much better :(

Anyways, I still watch the monthly releases to see if anything game changing get's added to UDK but for now I'm messing around in the heroengine. And If I get sick of that, I'll probably fall back to cryengine.

[ambershee]

I feel your pain; effective grass rendering in UDK is a nightmare. UDK hates overdraw and doesn't give you much in the way of flexibility for heavily instanced, yet simple meshes.

What was your issue with collision? We've had problems here, but they have all been resolvable.

[ultramedia]

re collision, good question because it's an even better answer that everyone should know about. It most likely is an issue to look out for in other game engines too.

I was bringing in height maps and adjusting their vertical scale in a little free app called HMCS-V200 from the lilchips website. It's really great because it will let you adjust your heightmap from a range of 0 - 65536 down to something smaller so that it doesn't create *ridiculously* high peaks in your landscape when you import it.

But there's a huge booby trap (not the good kind). Height map values in most engines can only be between 0 and 65536. To be more specific, they can't be NEGATIVE. So if you got a bunch of ground at height 0 in your height map (solid black) and you try to sculpt it down lower than 0, it'll cycle around back up to 65536 and all a sudden you'll have this freaky great big spike going up into orbit.

Also, landscape in UDK seems to have problems doing collision on terrain with 0 height in it's heightmap, which can lead to you just falling through it to your doom which is very annoying and very hard to track down why it's doing it.

Anyways, I did a technical diagram on my brand new bamboo tablet using the pathetically awful free drawing app that came with it (bamboo paper).

http://www.showmethatagain.com/posts/image_20120131_074235.jpg

Hope that helps everyone, if it doesn't make sense, read it again and again until it does (unless you *like* pulling your hair out at 2am with heightmap based terrain in UDK).

[dpaynter26]

YAY A DEAD WEBSITE! :) It says should be back up in a week, hopefully that's true because i dont know how long it's actually said that!

[ultramedia]

for a while now... I guess I can change the message tonight...

[Leodido]

I hope you'll get back on your feet soon, your tuts were nice