Future Work

There are a number of improvements that can potentially be made to the terrain system for anyone interested in taking the system further. You can reach out to the O3DE community to talk about any terrain enhancements or ideas on the #sig-content channel on Discord . We are happy to help!

Large-scale improvements

This category of improvements requires architecting solutions to provide extensive new capabilities.

3D geometry support

Instead of a heightfield-based approach, the APIs and renderer can be extended to use a full 3D approach, whether it’s through voxels, displacement maps, mesh ingestion, raytracing, or some other technology. This would enable the system to support caves, arches, cliff geometry, and other vertical or overlapping terrain features that can’t be supported through a pure heightfield approach.

The API extensions will likely consist of redefining the current APIs to provide the highest elevation terrain data that appears below the given query input positions, and then adding more APIs to provide all the terrain data that exists at or below the given query positions.

GPU calculation support

The terrain system is built on top of the gradient components, which perform all of their calculations on the CPU. However, a GPU can perform bulk computations like these far more optimally. An overhaul or replacement of the gradient system that supports GPU-side calculations can improve the terrain system’s performance by orders of magnitude. The primary caveats are that the data is still needed on the CPU to feed to physics, generalized raycasts, and other systems, and that it should be possible to still use the terrain system on devices with limited or no GPU capabilities (low-end phones, headless servers, etc).

Additional features

This category of improvements may be incrementally added to the system without fundamentally altering anything about how the system currently works.

Triangle split direction

Currently, the terrain always triangulates each quad in the same uniform direction. This can be replaced with heuristics for choosing the best direction for each quad. This can even be exposed as multiple heuristics: same direction for every quad, alternating directions per quad, or best choice per quad based on vertex heights. This decision should be controlled at the terrain system level, so that the information can be provided consistently to the terrain debugger, terrain physics, terrain rendering, terrain raycasting, etc.

Improved shape to height workflows

Currently, it’s somewhat non-intuitive to create terrain heights directly from primitive shape components. The best options are to use either the Shape Falloff Gradient or the Surface Altitude Gradient, but they’re both problematic. The Shape Falloff Gradient creates falloff based on a shape’s distance from the bottom of a box instead of falloff from the shape’s world position, making it hard to control. The Surface Altitude Gradient doesn’t support falloff and the auto-refresh doesn’t work. Either of these components can be improved or a new component can be added, to make it easier to place a shape with falloff into the world and turn it into a height gradient.

Masking / blending

Add controls to the Terrain Layer Spawner and the Terrain Macro Material to allow each one to mask and blend instead of completely replacing the data. This would make it much easier to create small terrain “stamps” for things like craters.

First-class “hole” support

Holes can be created right now by authoring a high-priority terrain layer spawner with no ground plane for whatever size is desired. However, it would be nice to have additional authoring controls to make it possible to put holes directly into gradient data, possibly either through a second alpha channel, or through a separate gradient on the Terrain Height Gradient List component.

Improved terrain texturing

There are a number of features that would be nice to add to the terrain texturing:

• Decals - both stamps for surface marks and textures that can repeat directionally along a spline or shape for things like paths and roads.
• Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) support - improves the lighting of small surface details.
• Triplanar mapping - improves the application of textures on vertical surfaces.

Mesh blending

Arbitrary meshes should be able to be “planted” into the terrain surface with height, color, and surface blending to help the meshes integrate more seamlessly into the terrain.