The error was related to an empty material, and I can think of a few reasons why this might have happened. If you wouldn’t mind removing the old version, and installing this replacement, I’d appreciate it.
It may give a different error, or issue. If it seems to work, perhaps try adding a second landscape with a different material and see if that works.
1. When you push Mesh Displace button with ant mesh selected it appears an error message:
Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/User/Library/Application Support/Blender/2.82/scripts/addons/txa_ant/mesh_ant_displace.py", line 595, in invoke
return self.execute(context)
File "/Users/User/Library/Application Support/Blender/2.82/scripts/addons/txa_ant/mesh_ant_displace.py", line 692, in execute
x = meshsize_x * (i / (tex_size_x - 1) - 1 / 2)
NameError: name 'meshsize_x' is not defined
2. The Invert button (Landscape Noise Panel) is empty, there isn’t text for the button.
I done a tidy up of the UI to fix a few things, and remove a few buttons that no longer have a function.
In particular, I’ve restored the function of the main presets on the re-do page that are help in demonstrating the range of landscapes that can be made. I also changed the default noise basis from ‘Perlin’ to ‘Blender’ due to the little bugs in the perlin function.
At the moment, there isn’t a link between the main presets and the erosion and material presets. I might have a look at this. For example, it would be handy if when you selected ‘Volcano’ from the main presets to get a volcano shaped landscape, it selected a volcano texture.
Here’s a small update to the add-on to fix a couple of issues that were reported:
– Cliff preset does not match A.N.T. Landscape
– The path to presets and materials is lost if you put the addon in a custom scripts folder
I just wanted to say thank you for developing this addon! It really takes away a lot of the drawbacks of the original ANT landscapes addon, and the custom materials are amazing!
The main issue is the materials which are stored as the nodes and connections. When a new blender version adds pins to the main shader blocks (like the new alpha input to the Principled BSDF in 2.91), it mucks up the materials.
This was the reasoning behind the version numbering of the addon. The number indicates the first version that it works on, then it should keep working on subsequent blender releases until the next addon version with a new number.
Thank you very much for TXA, it’s amazing.
I am a newbie in Blender, I’d like to know how I could go about baking textures in to the model for export to a game egine (Unity).
I tried baking it and this is what i got.
Baking isn’t one of Blender’s strong points! There are quite a few baking addons around, but I haven’t seen any that I think would bake materials with multiple Principled BSDF nodes. There might be…
It’s not that hard to bake the pbr textures manually, but if you’re new to blender, this explanation might be a bit hard to follow. Let’s give it a go anyway.
It looks like you were trying to bake the ‘desert’ texture? Firstly I would make sure the TXA_ANT texture size matched the map size I was trying to make (eg 1024x1024). The subdivision modifier needs to be applied as well to make sure there’s enough real geometry to bake.
To get a diffuse color map, I would go into the material nodes, and expand (using tab) the node group called ‘Mesa’. There is a Principled BSDF like this:
I’d then replace the Principled BSDF with an Emission BSDF and connect the Color input to the node that was supplying the diffuse color to the Principled node like this:
Then I would change the render engine to cycles, and bake just the emission like this.
Then to do the roughness map, I’d go back to the Emission BSDF and connect the node that supplied the roughness input to the Principled node, and again bake the emission to a new texture. Repeat for any other maps you need.
Here’s the diffuse color map I got from this process.
The normal map generated by TXA_ANT should already be good to go.
The other TXA materials like ‘Forested’ have several Principled BSDF nodes (one per node group), and you’d have to do the Emission node trick to each one.
Today I found this fantastic add-on. I am a total newbie to Blender. How do I export the created mesh as .glb or .fbx or any 3d file to use in other programs?
I am able to export a mesh created by A.N.T Landscape but it has no texture. When I try exporting a textured mesh with TXA Landscape, I either get an empty file or a mesh with no texture. Is there an instruction or a video to explain exporting a textured mesh?
The current version uses Blender nodes to create the texture. I’m afraid that won’t export to a third party program. There are various commercial addons that will bake the material to standard pbr textures which then could be exported.
I have been working on some extra features for Blender 3.0, and these include a built in PBR baking feature. I’ve been slowed down a bit by some Blender 3.0 alpha bugs that cause crashes when images are created, but it looks like the most serious one has been fixed recently. Hopefully I’ll have something ready in the next few weeks.
TXA_Ant version 3.004 for Blender 3.0 is done. You can download it here: txa_ant_3_00_4.zip
This version has a few new features:
Bake to PBR
The addon produces blender procedural materials by default which are easy to tweak to suit your purpose, but they can’t be exported easily to third party programs such as game engines, sketchfab etc. They can be a little slow to load as well. There is now a ‘Bake to PBR’ function that bakes the material to a standard PBR material, with Basecolor, roughness, emissive, displacement and normal maps. This makes it easy to export.
Replace Existing Textures
If you have a customised material you want to copy onto a new landscape, the “Replace Existing Textures” button will update the material to make sure it’s using the erosion and height maps for the new model.
High Peak Material
I added a new material called high peak. It’s not as user friendly as the others and needs a high texture resolution to look any good, but I needed a more ‘windswept’ looking mountain scene and this is what I came up with.
Here’s a video giving an example of baking a PBR material, and exporting to Unreal Engine 4.
Well, Blender 4.0 is nearly here. It’s an API breaking release, so it’s time for a new version of txa_ant. There features are the same - the release is just to make it compatible. There are a few significant changes under the hood to make it easier to maintain, so let me know if there are issues.
The zip file can be downloaded there, or the direct link is: txa_ant_4_00_0.zip
This is for Blender 4.0 and higher only! (Versions that work for earlier blender versions are available on the github site).
The first post on this thread has more information.
With the imminent release of Blender 4.0, it’s a good time to think about the future of this addon (and whether it’s still relevant).
Blender’s geometry nodes are amazing, and I’ve been having fun working with them. There are any number of publicly available nodes for landscapes and erosion. Perhaps this is the way to go.
However, I think there’s still room for this addon. This addon is based on the original A.N.T. addon in Blender. It’s a great addon, but I was a little frustrated at having to generate a mesh with millions of vertices just to bake the detail in bitmaps and then reduce the resolution back down. If we want to finish with bitmaps, why not just do the calcuations on bitmaps? I added my bit at least partly to demonstrate the concept.
I still use the txa_ant addon myself to generate quick, distant assets. I don’t want them to have a a high vertex count, or to be doing erosion calculations every time I load the blend file. That means that if I use geometry nodes to generate the landscape, I would again be generating a high res version and then baking to a low res version.
That’s not to say that geometry nodes shouldn’t play a part. I’ve long thought of adding some lightweight tree and rock scattering to the addon, and geometry nodes would play a part in that. Now that txa_ant incorporates a blend file library, that should be easy to do, so I might give it a go.
I wouldn’t mind some feedback. Do you agree, or are you finding that geo node based solutions are filling the need?
