Painting on the landscapes

Hiya, followed your tutorials and now we need to paint our own materials over the terrain but can’t work out how… Can you give us some pointers please for painting materials over the world terrain please?

Hello,

We’re still working on a solution for painting materials and textures on the terrain. It’s possible by setting up a material that samples vertex color and using the Mesh Paint mode to paint vertex color, but unfortunately it isn’t saved between sessions. Please check out this issue on Github for more information and to get the latest updates on this.

Once we get it working properly, we’re planning to make a tutorial that guides users through painting on terrain.

Will we be able to use the water plugin on our maps at anytime in the near future? The project I’m working on uses water extensively?

1 Like

Hello @UnrealVistas ,

Regarding water specifically, we are working on a course auto-application of water effects. The underlying coastline data as well as the approach may be improved in the future, but here is the open GitHub pull request in case you are interested.

The water plugin should work already to some extent with Cesium for Unreal. While the tools provided in the water plugin won’t yet interact with Cesium 3D Tilesets like they do with landscapes, you should be able to use custom water bodies. If you are running into issues with that, let us know! If it’s a problem with Cesium for Unreal, we’ll want to create an issue to track the problem on Github.

Yes I found that the custom water body worked just fine. I could ‘paint’ an existing lake and the heightmap cropped the water very well.

That looks really good! Looking forward to seeing that in UE.

It does WORK… but often you need to dig into the terrain to make the lake convincing. Will we be able to do this soon? Or am i wasting my time waiting for this feature? Please tell :slight_smile:

Hi @UnrealVistas,

We have not been able to get working on this feature yet, unfortunately, but there is a feature coming soon that might work well for that use case. We are updating the raster overlay system to allow users to draw out areas and edit the material in that area only. You can learn more about the status of this feature here - https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium-unreal/pull/446

I haven’t tested it out for this use case, but I imagine you could draw out a shape over your lake, and then either:
a) use a world position offset node to push the mesh vertices down and artificially dig out room that way
b) mask out the lakebed entirely, and add a small landscape there. Then, you could sculpt the landscape to conform to your desired lakebed shape.

If this sounds feasible for you, you can test it out right now using the Github branch above. We are hoping to complete this feature in the next release or two.

-Alex

1 Like

Is there already anything related to painting textures on the terrain?

@Dafar Not yet. Latest on this can be tracked in this issue.

what if you use a camera looking down and apply a heightmap shader to the landscape, so its 0-100 etc as a grey scale , topographic camera giving you a heightmap from a render target, so in cesium, you scale up your box to encompass the landmass you want baked…

then bake it into an editable unreal landscape

Hello,
I am writing to also request this feature. Native support to paint directly on the landscape or use procedural materials on specific areas would be a huge step for Cesium Unreal. For the work I do, it would be game-changing. Is there any news on when we can expect this feature to be implemented? It seems like this has been a requested feature since the release of Cesium for Unreal.

1 Like

Is there any update on this? It would be very useful for our Archviz workflow.

Depending on what exactly you mean, procedural materials may be possible. Have you seen this tutorial?

But we have no updates on painting interactively on terrain / 3D Tiles. If you have ideas on how this could be implemented, we’d be interested. We probably haven’t given it enough thought yet, but it’s not obvious.