Terrain3D for Godot 4 - C++ Editable Terrain System 

Great, looking forward to it. As you saw in the video, it works in gd4, but we do get a lot of errors in the console.

Please do. I'm switching over all Godot 3 projects to Godot 4 completely. I feel much more comfortable knowing the editor is only getting better until Godot 5.

Thank you

Thanks. Use the right tool for the job. Doubling scatter functionality would be redundant and take our time away from terrain.

Thanks!

Best option is to have multiple similar textures and paint them together in patterns (or use noise to identify). AAA games don't have large swathes of one texture. They are continually changing textures. Color variation or detiling methods can aide. Custom shaders with uniforms now fully work so you can add anything we don't provide in the base shader. I plan to add detiling and noise based patterns to an optional auto shader.

@@TokisanGames oh I see I just started using godot as hobby lately and the community has been great so far, thanks for the enlightening comment best of luck on your development.

but needed.

I've heard that internally they are very similar, one might use the other. But shaders vs MMI have very different interfaces to set them up.

We have started it. It needs to be a community supported project. Godot already has a FastNoise module, which I helped put in years ago. But it only generates 8-bit noise and you need 16-bit for heights to look good.

@@TokisanGames I understand well your intent, since I also made some components for Godot at some point, and I have the same line of thought to not be bound forever to some projects. I totally respect your will to let the community support the project, and I thank you anyway for the work so far. About the noise module, I'm not sure about what you mean. My idea was to be able to provide a custom made generator that is more complex than just a single FastNoise input. I would find it great to procedurally generate the terrain on the fly. But one single FastNoiseLite layer would not be enough, since it would not make credible lands and lakes by itself, no matter what kind of noise is used. Maybe I should ask in a different way. Is it possible to provide a custom heightmap datasource that can be programmatically generated?

@@gokudomatic Is it possible for me to write a procedural generator in the tool? Possible yes but low priority. Is it possible for you to generate your own heightmap however and insert it in programmatically? Yes read importer.gd or codegenerated.gd to see how to use the gdscript api.

Currently allows up to 16k^2. We're discussing the possibility of expanding that much larger up to 45k^2, 90k^2 or more but it's a low priority at the moment.

When viewing the wire frame you saw lods, lower levels of detail or low resolution meshes extending out from the camera, and moving with the camera. That mesh is shaped by the GPU. You didn't see high resolution chunks of terrain fixed in place and created and destroyed by the CPU as the camera moves, and as was shown conceptually in the animation. You'll have to do some research on terrain system designs to learn of the different types. If you look in our wiki under system design you'll see a link about clipmaps from Mike Savage with animated clips. The Witcher 3 uses a clipmap terrain.

That's what is currently implemented. You can access more right now with vertex spacing. We're using texture arrays, which support up to 2048 layers on modern cards. With a 1k region size, 45km^2 could be supported without much work, and 90km with 2k region sizes. However, to be practical, Godot needs to finish supporting 64-bit ints, and working above 16km you really need a double precision build. Follow issues #77 and 159.

OK, thanks for the report. We'll have to analyze it further, later. We want to use the nav server in OOTA as well.

Importer is in the tools dir under addons. Please see the documentation. There's a page dedicated to importing. Come to discord for help.

You can add meshes for the few places you need an overhang as most games do. Witcher 3 uses heightmaps, is that obsolete? How about UE5 which Witcher 4 will use. Few games use voxels unless they are voxel specific as they are much slower than other terrains. If your game has that specific need, there's a voxel tool you can use. No need for us to make a voxel terrain when Zylann already has one.

@@TokisanGames What if you need overhangs everywhere?

@@UltimatePerfection Either buy high quality rock assets and reuse them to place overhangs everywhere, or use (and pay the performance hit) for a voxel terrain.

Please read the wiki. There is a page that describes the exact process with free tools.

The wiki documentation describes how to make textures. The exact software and steps to do. You don't need to figure it out, just follow the directions. Please come to discord for help as I might not see comments.

@@TokisanGames How can I find the link to Discord?

@@redlinux34 It's in the description of this video.

You can import PNG directly to our tool. But Godot can't read 16-bit PNGs and 8-bit looks like terraced garbage. EXR or R16 are appropriate for heightmaps, so if you got a 16-bit PNG convert to one of those. If you want to blur heightmaps, use any photo editing tool, which are designed for it. Set it to 16-bit mode first, then use exr for export. You can also scale up maps in the photoeditor. We'll build image editing tools in ours, but there are much more important features that are higher priority first. Still, we're not going to build photoshop into the terrain. The expectation should be that some external editing is necessary for all terrain systems.

@@TokisanGames yeah 30 min after this comment I took Gimp and filter my Highmap so I dont have the Pyramides Effekt anymore :D Thanks yeah 8 Bit looks like shit :D

There is a PR with a temporary nav baker, and another person is working on a built in nav baker if you wait a week or so.

We have hundreds of people using it successfully. Come in to discord for help. Can't do anything here.

A sandbox playing with other systems with a static terrain, sure. A sandbox playing with a destructable terrain, use Zylann's voxel terrain. Look at my other videos.

Use Zylann's voxel terrain, which supports blocky or smooth voxels. See the other videos on my channel regarding it. This isn't the right tool for that, although it is possible with the API if you modify the heightmap image and force update.

@@TokisanGames Interesting. Thanks for the reply! Well, i mean, if this tool is better in general, why not take a stab at it and see if maybe it can have features you want, ya know? But i get your point. Still, I just checked out your recommendation and there was a Godot 4.1 compatibility update. Awesome! Subbed! Good stuff you have here.

I mean, there are tons of third party terrain generators, it's not exactly a priority for the core dev team.

​ @chrismcpherson7582 I hate this answer so much. A terrain generator MUST be a priority on all game engines.

@@AldoGDev why? When there are already so many tools that do it, WHY should the core dev team spend time and energy implementing it when it's been done to death already? I want godot to continue to improve the rendering and stability, not put in tools that I already have avaliable to me elsewhere, better than what they can ever possibly implement.

@@GoblinArmyInYourWalls Because if its not the core dev team, others won't spend time to build the ideal "terrain editor". Look at zylann plugin, you think it's working well right? Let me tell you that: it is absolutely not. You can't have more than 4 textures (don't even try multisplat16 or the array method), you can't use it with built-in godot navigation system, you can't do a lot of others things. Third party plugins are cool, but people do it on their free time, and they always build the tools for their own needs. So yes sorry but no, not a single 3rd party plugin available here is even close to the unity editor.

@@AldoGDev you do realize that "third party" doesn't mean exclusive to godot plug ins, right? Blender, World Creator, Houdini, World Machine, Gaia, Vue, Terragen, etc. Blender alone is EVERYTHING you need. You can sculpt terrain and you can use Geometry nodes, and there are tons of terrain specific plug ins, and the workload between it and godot is getting better all the time. The reason the core devs don't feel the need to prioritize it is BECAUSE ITS ALREADY THERE.

Coming in a few weeks. I'm finishing some new features first that will be shown off.

@@TokisanGames ok

Documentation has a status page. This channel has two newer videos recently released.

This video is from the initial release months ago. Exported games work fine now. See the front page of the wiki for updated status on various elements.

@@TokisanGames Alright, thank you!

On the terrain, you get a discount, fine sir. However, we'll take your money when we release our game sometime between 2024 and 2099.

You just need to install it properly in your project. Please go to the repository or discord for support, not here.

It provides a large terrain with texturing capabilities, so yes it can be your base.

This system would be way more performant. Unless I'm missing something from your suggestion, making one giant open world mesh in Blender and importing it to Godot would be absolutely horribly laggy. You need a lot of in-engine code to keep things smooth, external 3D modelling software can't help with that at all.

​@@lizardrainpeople who do it in blender slice the world in many pieces, each piece with multiple LODs that are loaded based on the distance...which is pretty much the standard of open world games since the very first open world game ever ...it requires way less code than making a new terrain system in Godot or making a terrain system in any game engine and is very performant. If so many people tried to make so many ways to create terrain in Godot, there must be some pros and cons that's why I'm asking.

Workflow is of utmost importance in gamedev, esp with a team. When we're designing levels we need to sculpt the terrain, texture it, place foliage, around the houses, rocks and other meshes we're placing for a holistic look. Working on all of it simultaneously is 10x or 100x better than having to stop, edit and paint the mesh in another app and reimport. Blender import is fine for small games targeting lower end hardware.

you can only reduce the size and the lod. atm.

Density of vertices at lod0 is always 1 currently. Change the number of lods and size in the clipmap settings.

Discussed in this video.

Coming in a few weeks after I finish some features in the next version.

why you say that, this is a good solution, it just an alpha yet, performance can still be further optimized tho.

@@saul8510 this is very good work,and I cannot thank them enough for it.If this addon keeps on being work and it will be the best for terrain. Godot may not aim to be unity or unreal but if the part of the engine feature are subpar,don't be bother to put it in the engine(particle system is one of them).

"Rome was not built in a day"

@@TokisanGames of course but they still lay the foundation brick by brick...when the core Dev outright reject terrain in the core.

Come in to discord for help. Can't do anything here. Read your console. Probably tells you more info.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Visually is no problem. Collision is a big problem, but we have a solution.