Creating a New Level

Overview

The following tutorial will show how to set up a new level and its initial terrain map.
Terrain elevation in CRYENGINE Sandbox is based on brightness values of a height map textures assigned to the terrain geometry.

Creating a New Level Folder and File

On the File menu, click New:

In the New Level dialog box enter a name for the level in the Level Name text box. You should adjust the Heightmap Resolution and the Meters Per Unit (or, Meters Per Pixel) according to the size and and detail level required for your level.

The Terrain Size (listed below the two drop down menus) is simply a multiplication of the Heightmap Resolution and Meters Per Unit. Click OK to create your new level.

When you click OK, a new subfolder within the 'Levels' directory is created. It uses the name provided under 'Level Name' and contains various files. The most important file in that directory is the *.cry file, which contains all the main information that is required by the Editor.

Adding Terrain to the Level

Generating a Terrain

Now, there is a new empty level, filled with water and terrain underneath it. You will probably need some terrain to walk on and there are three main ways to do that - You can sculpt in manually, import a heightmap or have Sandbox automatically generate a heightmap.

To create terrain, on the Terrain menu, click Edit Terrain:

This opens the Terrain Editor:

Next, on the Tools menu, click Generate Terrain:

This will display the Generation dialog box, where you can influence the appearance of the terrain by using the following parameters:

The default settings are good, so click OK. After the generation has been completed, you should see something similar to this:

The terrain will be in gray, which resembles the height of the terrain. The brighter the terrain, the higher it is. The blue water texture indicates that the terrain in that area is below sea level (user definable), giving you a correct impression of the actual land masses.

On older versions of CryENGINE, to get a first impression with a default texture applied, you need to regenerate the surface texture of the terrain. Since CryENGINE 3.4 however, terrain textures are generated upon level creation so this will have already been done.

Now, close the Terrain window and you will be able to see the changes in the perspective view.

Generating Surface Texture

On the File menu, click Generate surface texture:

The Generate Terrain Texture dialog box will be displayed. Default settings are usually OK. A description of the options can be found below.

Click OK and wait until the calculation has been completed.

High Quality

• It uses more different code for texture compression.
• Terrain texture generation will take 2-3 more time but there will be less compression artifacts.
• It does not affect memory usage or CPU in final game.

Calculate Terrain Sky Accessibility

• It will export additional textures containing ambient occlusion information and normals.
• In final game if e_TerrainAo is non-zero it will darken terrain and objects depending on terrain and vegetation around. Additionally terrain normals will be more detailed at distance, so lighting will look more detailed.
• In final game it will cause little more intensive texture streaming, but should not increase memory usage.

Terrain Color Multiplier

When the generated surface texture is compressed using DXT, its colors always get somewhat distorted. If the colors use the full dynamic range (0-255), they are preserved better. If artists know that they have used only darker colors in the level, they can use the Terrain Color Multiplier to make the colors use more of the dynamic range. For example, if only colors in the 0-63 range have been used, enter a multiplier of 4 to make them fill the entire 0-255 range and 'survive' the compression in better shape. When rendering, the decompressed color values should be divided by the multiplier in the shader to restore the original brightness.

Pre-generated	1x Color Multiplier	4x Color Multiplier

Results

The view should now look similar to this, showing you a first impression of the landscape.

You will now be able to jump into the game mode by holding down Ctrl and pressing G, and you can run around in the new creation.

Things to experiment with:

• Change the parameters when creating the terrain.
• Change the resolution of the created surface texture, to either speed up the calculation, or to increase the quality.
• Manually sculpt terrain with the terrain brush tools.

Terrain Editor Reference

This section has information on the Terrain Editor's menus and toolbar.

ToolBar

File

Modify

Tools

Options