ZScripts + masked displacement maps

[dineshk]

Hi,

We are currently using zbrush in house to sculpt large scale terrain (16 sq km), and this scheme works reasonably well. I've been looking at zscript as a possible way to flatten out terrain for a road network and this doesn't look to be possible from what I've looked at so far.

I generate the required height field for the roads, and I want to apply this as a masked (feathered) displacement map to displace the terrain to smoothly blend towards the required heights.

Is there any way to do this either in zscript, or is there a lower level SDK which will allow us to do this?

Regards,
Dinesh

[marcus_civis]

I'm a little unsure as to why you would want to script this. Is it to automate the task for several maps?

[dineshk]

We need to script this as doing it by hand is unfeasable with a world which is that big. In addition to that, the road network changes very often.

The workflow we are trying to achieve is the artists work on sculpting the terrain with rather general knowledge of where the towns are, etc. and the actual road network is flattened in before exporting the mesh into our processing tool.

[marcus_civis]

If you can find a satisfactory working method that can be automated - for example, applying an alpha as a mask and then offsetting vertically by a set amount in the Deformation submenu - then you could use a zscript. But there's no way to displace specific vertices thru scripting, or any low-level SDK available that would help.