TerrainDeformation
Deforming the terrain, as you've probably guessed, is the main goal of this whole editor.
If you've ever used a terrain editor of any kind before, you probably know what to expect. Left click the terrain to raise it, and right click to lower it. There are a few other deformation options available.
This does exactly what you think it does. Will ask first, since doing this by accident could be a bit of a bummer.
There are three different deformation modes.
In all modes, the region of the affected terrain will be based on the selected brush. White parts of the brush will be affected more, while dark areas will be affected less.
| Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Raise/Lower | The main editing mode; left click to raise the terrain, right click to lower it. |
| Average | Smooth over bumpy regions of the terrain under the cursor. |
| Zero | Reset the region of the terrain under the cursor. |
Affects the intensity of all three deformation modes. A higher rate will cause the terrain to rise/lower faster, or cause Average and Zero modes to approach their target values faster.
You can do batch operations on the entire terrain. This was my favorite part of the editor to write. You can mutate terrain using Perlin noise, an image texture, or both.
Mutation values will be added to whatever the terrain already looks like. This means you can do things such as applying a small amount of noise to terrain sculpted manually to give it a rougher, more natural look, or apply the same mutation settings multiple times to make the effect more pronounced.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Smoothness | The smoothness of generated noise. A higher value will produce smoother terrain, but will take longer to generate. |
| Noise Amplitude | The amplitude of generated noise. |
| Texture Amplitude | The amplitude of the texture used for mutation. |
| Generation Texture | You may pick an image texture used for mutation. This is similar to (although not exactly like) importing a heightmap. In this case, white areas of the texture will be raised, black areas will be lowered, and 50% gray areas will stay where they were. To use your own image as a mutation texture, add it as a brush. |
You can amplify (or reduce) the elevation of the entire terrain with this setting. Applying a global scale of 0 effectively does the same thing as Reset Height.
Increase or decrease the radius of the deformation brush. A larger brush will have a minor effect on the editor performance, although perhaps not as much as you might expect.
You can select a brush shape to use. See also the Brushes manager.
Pro tip: Juju Adams' avatar is unironically a good brush to use to add wrinkles to your terrain. The jokes practically write themselves.