As powerful as the current D5 Terrain system is for large-scale landscapes and distant environments, it becomes quite difficult to use when working on detailed, small-scale elements like courtyards, street surroundings, and gardens.
Let’s say we’ve imported a height map to represent the surrounding topography, and now we want to integrate buildings, roads, or garden elements into it. Currently, we face several limitations:
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Brush Scale Limitations
The smallest brush size (around 1 meter) is too large for detailed work. It lacks the precision needed for fine adjustments around courtyards, paths, and landscape edges. On top of that, the brush strength is often too aggressive at small scales, making subtle changes hard to control. -
Brush vs. Objects Conflict
Terrain brushes do not affect areas underneath or too close to objects. This makes it nearly impossible to blend terrain smoothly around roads, walls, or building bases. Clean integration between surfaces becomes a trial-and-error process with inconsistent results. Ironically the paint brush which actually should not ignore other objects, perfectly ignores them and we later have to use CULL effect for scatter. -
Lack of Terrain Breaks & Height Gaps
In real landscape design, it’s common to have sharp changes in elevation — for example, a retaining wall with a 1-meter difference on either side. Right now, there’s no way to create these controlled breaks in elevation with precision. -
No Path-Based Terrain Adjustment
Imagine being able to draw a path around your building, roads, or garden — and the terrain auto-adjusting to meet it. It could flatten, slope, or smooth as needed, eliminating the uneven, wavy ground we get from manually brushing.
Even better, if these drawn paths could define zones, we could assign different materials for things like grass, gravel, or tiles — and then scatter plants or objects more accurately. Perfect for gardens, courtyards, or landscape beds.
Summary: The D5 Terrain tool has huge potential, but right now, it’s only optimized for large-scale use like mountains and backgrounds. If we could bring precision, object-aware editing, and path-based controls to the terrain tools, it would completely change how we approach courtyards, garden layouts, and real-world topography integration.
This would make D5 even a greater tool for landscape architecture and urban design.