Terrain conforming

Rocky101

The tools to adjust terrain to the spline are good, but it would also be good to have some functionality to conform the spline to terrain eg. your spline hovers over the terrain a certain distance, you enable "Spline Conform" and it gets conformed to it and if you disable "Spline Conform" then the spline goes back to its original state.

Of course, very often the terrain is very noisy, and that will result in a very bad/ugly looking terrain conforming.
And that's where the current Curve Architect terrain adjust functionality kicks in: instead of conforming "every vertex unit" you can adjust the conforming to be "every x distance" eg.: conform every 1m to ensure non-noisy results. So then you can apply the Curve Architect current terrain adjusting functionality on top of that conforming and ta'da! A smooth terrain conforming no matter how noisy is the terrain!

And that would make Curve Architect offer a functionality none of the other spline solutions I have tried on the asset store possess, they either possess terrain adjusting or terrain conforming but never both.

A bonus feature, albeit possibly complicated to implement, would be all overlapping terrain conformed splines getting automatically joined/welded together at the interception points.

MikeDanielsson

Thanks for your suggestion. It sounds like a really good feature.

I'm currently making some big changes to Curve Architect because of several bug fixes Unity has made to their API. Some systems in Curve Architect now only need half the code because I no longer need to use workarounds for various Unity bugs. It will also perform better in the editor and take up less disk space in your built game.

This will probably take 1 to 3 weeks to complete. After that, I will look into this. I can say that a simpler version of this will be implemented: you press a button, and all the control points of an ArchitectCurve conform to the terrain or other objects with a collider. I can’t promise if a more advanced version will be implemented, but I will look into it. If it’s not too time-consuming, I might add it.

Rocky101

Was bored so created a diagram just so you can more easily visualize what I am trying to get at 🙂
https://imgur.com/a/o2I9pT3

Basically as you can see, if you tell the spline to conform only every x distance (let's assume "x = 1m" in that image), then you get a less noisy spline, and you can then proceed to adjust that terrain underneath to it. So you could say it is like "a weight averaging process" in order to eliminate the excess noise so you do not get very chaotic bad looking roads when conforming them which is pretty much the case with every other spline solution I have tried to use for runtime usage.

MikeDanielsson

Thanks for the illustration. Yes, I got the idea.

If you have the time I would love to know a bit more of what your trying to do. Deforming roads in the terrain that look a bit more realistic? If that's the case you can already do it by adding noise to the terrain deformation in the noise effect section.

How to:

Select the Architect curve.
Press the Noise effect button in the Architect Curve menu.
Press Create Noise and play around with the values.
Select all anchors and adjust the Noise center smooth value under Terrain in the control point menu.

Here is an example of a mountain and a path created with two Architect Curves using noise effects:

Rocky101

Yes, that works very well and I have already used it.
And now that you mention it, I have been proposing this whole "solution" without having even given a try to how Curve Architect current terrain smoothing tools would work alongside conforming (that is, applying smoothing manually after the conforming process).
I was just proposing ahead of time a solution for how to avoid results such as "a bad road conforming to a noisy terrain" where the geometry becomes all deformed like this:
https://imgur.com/a/V27Txcm
https://imgur.com/a/MeoR9fN

The usage I have in mind is "drawing a spline-based planar city map of roads placed 1000m above the terrain" and then conforming that spline network to the terrain "all automatically". It is for runtime purposes after all, think City Skylines but done in my own way.

But you are correct.
Whenever you end up adding Terrain Conforming, I will give it a try with the current Spline Architect terrain smoothing tools and see what results I end up getting and then contact you again if I have any suggestion.
It could be the Curve Architect deformation algorithm is much more superior to the other solutions I have tried so there wouldn't be any need to apply the technique I am suggesting in order to make a road look good with it. I was getting too ahead there.

Also wanted to point out the forum keeps displaying this error message and I couldn't reply to this when I wanted a few hours ago, same as last time:
https://imgur.com/a/ZcT5Rh7
Happens in both Firefox and Chrome. Had to erase Browser story in Chrome in order to reply.

MikeDanielsson

I can see your use case. I would guess the current terrain deformation system is good enough. You have a lot of options with it. It also have a none destructible work flow.

Hove every Curve Architect does not currently support terrain deformation during runtime. This might be added later and would not be that hard to implement, because everything is more or less already done. I just need to change the overall system for terrain deformation to work during runtime.

Damn, I have had some issues with the forum. I like the overall simple design of it, but it has some really annoying bugs. Please let me know if it happens again.