MeshDataTool or Shader?

Help
1

Godot Version

4.3

Question

Hey all! I have a large plane mesh (MeshInstance3D) that I have subdivided. My plan is to use this subdivision to make terrain, but I’m actually not sure which way I should go about doing it. I have found some information of shaders that manipulate planes, and I have found information on MeshDataTool that manipulates the mesh. I am not sure which is the best route to go here, so looking for some info. I don’t have any physics in my game, so I don’t have to worry about that aspect thankfully.

I want to be able to manually set the heights of each point to make the terrain, but most of the information I am finding is showing me how to do procedurally generated terrain, which I don’t want to do. It seems that a shader is a popular method for this, but since I don’t want things to be random I am not sure if a shader is the way to go or not.

So basically I am not sure how to modify the mesh to get a terrain, at least not manually. And not sure which of the two methods is the way to go for this.

1 Like
2

Is your terrain data updated frequently? For a Shader-edited or CPU generated mesh the math will be quite similar, most use generative techniques for this but you can supply a heightmap of any source. What is your exact use case?

3

That makes sense. I’ve been digging into some terrain generation tutorials and that seems to be the best route. The terrain isn’t updated at all during runtime, so I think just generation is going to be the best way.

The current plan is for crearing terrain for my game, but not randomized. I want the game to be grid based, so generating an array of points works really well for me. Then I want to be able to manipulate those points up or down by a set amount (either 0.5 or 1, not sure which yet) to get some height. I am looking for straight lined terrain, not smooth rolling terrain.