Problem with making a terrain

Question

I am trying to make "2D" terrain. I discovered that in the Editor you can make a CollisionShape with a HeightMap Shape. With OpenSimplexNoise I managed to edit the HeightMap so that it has some random elevation.

However it only applies to the CollisionShape and I don't know how I can "link" it with a Mesh so that the Mesh is the same shape as the HeightMap.

I found out that you can make a CollisionShape based on a Mesh. Is there a way to make it the other way around?

Answer 1

Godot does not come with a terrain node to render heightmaps, so you have to script that.

There are several ways to go:

• Generate the mesh by code. That is, add every vertex yourself and connect them together to form the mesh. This can be accomplished with SurfaceTool, or just using raw arrays, creating an ArrayMesh and calling add_surface_from_arrays(). See https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/procedural_geometry/index.html

• Put heights into a texture, then use a MeshInstance with a subdivided PlaneMesh and displace it according to the texture using a shader. This is a common technique used by many terrain systems. You can see an example of that here (with water but it's the same idea): https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/shaders/your_first_shader/your_second_3d_shader.html#your-second-3d-shader

• Use a plugin. There are a few around: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset?category=&godot_version=&sort=updated&filter=terrain

Final note: be aware that in a heightmap, one cell == one vertex. So if for example you need a 1x1 terrain, you actually need 2x2 cells, because a quad contains 4 vertices. So if you need a 100x100 terrain, you will need 101x101 cells, and so on. See https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/58933

Comments

Thanks, this is what I was looking for!