Tykuii's Level Design Toolkit
1. Improved snapping features for draw modal tools.
2. Added two new draw modal tools: 2.a Draw area by lines. 2.b Draw area by curves.
3. Added Terrain Grid System:
Initialize Terrain: Sets up the blender scene to track terrain chunks. Required to start using Terrain Tools.
Settings:
Target Engine: Define the target engine (Blender is a safe default; Only changes conventions used in the processes).
Grid Scale: Define the size of each terrain chunk.
Resolution: Define the amount of vertices per terrain chunk.
Material: Define the blender material (existing in the scene) to use when creating new terrain chunks.
Base Vertex Color: Define the starting vertex colors per new terrain chunk.
Selected Chunk: Visible when a terrain chunk is selected.
Add Heightmap Displacement: Adds a displacement modifier to the selected chunk directly in the panel with matching parameters.
Conform Borders: Experimental feature to attempt to force-match border vertices. Currently it does not function well with corners.
Sync Geometry Heights: Experimental feature to blend chunks.
Gradient Blending: Blends the selected chunk to neighbors with a gradient influence to help match heights better. Currently has issues with corner vertices.
Linear Blending: Blends the selected chunk to linear neighbors only. Currently more stable.
Seam Shading: Tools to attempt to help blend normals between nonmatching geometry.
Bake Seamless Shading: The process is similar creating a duplicate -> joining and merging the chunks -> transferring the normal data to the original chunks individually and applying.
Averages normals between neighbors to attempt better normals.
Paint Normal Mask: The processes above can detract from desired normal details. Painting areas where you want normal blending operations to occur through this operation saves normals elsewhere.
Rotate CCW and Rotate CW:
Rotate the selected chunk counterclockwise or clockwise.
Swap: Having two chunks selected, properly swap places between the chunks while retaining proper tracking in the terrain grid system.
Delete: Delete and properly remove the selected chunk from the terrain grid system.
Merging:
Merge the selected chunks and enter sculpt mode for sculpting operations.
Lock X/Y Sculpting: Toggles a lock so that users can only sculpt on Z axis if desired.
Separate Into Original Chunks: Properly separate the merged chunks and retain terrain grid system tracking. Good for sculpting detail between borders.
Export:
Export Coordinates to Text: Stores the names and their coordinates of each terrain chunk to a text block to recreate in desired game engine.
Prep Meshes for Export: Zeros the transforms of all terrain chunks returning them to world origin.
Emergency Reset: If issues arise with the terrain chunk system, pressing this button will reset the system and allow for reinitialization.
Best example: Deleting a terrain chunk piece manually without having a second available to add more! Silly quirk of data tracking that I haven’t accounted for yet.