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REFERENCE

Roblox terrain glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms you'll run into when generating, importing, or editing Roblox terrain. Each entry is short on purpose — copy-pasteable into your team's onboarding doc.

Heightmap
A 2D image where pixel brightness encodes terrain elevation. Bright = high, dark = low. Roblox Studio can import 16-bit PNG heightmaps directly via the built-in Import Heightmap dialog.
Voxel terrain
3D terrain made of small cubic cells (voxels). Roblox uses a voxel grid that supports smooth blending between materials and per-voxel material assignment, so you get continuous-looking landscape from a discrete underlying grid.
Biome map
A 2D mask that tags regions of the terrain with biome IDs — forest, desert, snow, swamp. Used downstream to drive vegetation scatter, ambient sound, and which material the renderer picks for each region.
Slope-aware materials
Material assignment that picks a Roblox material based on the local slope angle as well as elevation. Sand on flats near sea level, grass on rolling slopes, rock on cliffs, snow on flat peaks. The default for Terrainio output.
.rbxm
Roblox Model file. A binary container holding one or more Roblox instances — meshes, terrain voxels, scripts, attributes. Drag-droppable into Roblox Studio.
Roblox Studio
Roblox's official authoring tool for building experiences. Free download; includes the built-in Terrain Editor with brush tools (Add, Subtract, Smooth, Flatten, Paint).
fBm (fractal Brownian motion)
A noise function built by summing several octaves of simpler noise (each octave is half the amplitude and twice the frequency of the last). Produces natural-looking, rolling terrain. The base layer of most procedural landscapes.
Ridged noise
A noise variant — typically 1 - |noise| — that produces sharp ridge lines. Common for mountain ranges; Terrainio blends it into upper elevations only so lowlands stay rolling.
Domain warping
A technique where the input coordinates of a noise function are themselves perturbed by another noise. Gives terrain organic, non-grid-aligned flow — without it, ridges visibly align with the underlying noise grid.
Sea level
The world Y coordinate at which a flat water plane sits. Anything below sea level is underwater; Terrainio places water bodies (sea, lakes, rivers) automatically based on the terrain shape.
Voxel resolution
The size of a single voxel cell in studs. Roblox terrain uses 4-stud voxels by default; finer resolutions cost memory and render time. Terrainio emits at the default resolution unless you ask for finer.
Procedural generation
Building content algorithmically from rules and seeds rather than by hand. Terrainio is procedural generation steered by a language model that interprets your prompt and chooses appropriate parameters.

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