Introducing Voxel Studio

This introduction was also long overdue. For more than a year I had this program that allows me to work on a definition for the procedural world, then schedule it as a render job in the Voxel Farm and finally show the results on screen. Many of the screenshots you have seen in the past were taken from the viewer in this program, but the UI for it remained hidden. Until today.

I give you Voxel Studio:

This program has a series of editors for the different things that make the procedural world. In the previous screenshot you can see the Terrain Layers editor, which allows to define the multiple layers of the terrain. For instance, there is one layer for each type of rock. The placement of these layers is determined by masks, which are the output of an earlier process. It also covers Vegetation and Architecture, but I plan to show that later this year.

Something I like about this program is that it uses the Voxel Farm to create previews. Right now I have only three good machines in the farm, a single scene like the one in the screenshot still takes close to a minute to render. If I had six machines I would wait only half that time.

The Renders view will show you a list of the jobs currently in execution inside the farm:

One only render job at this moment, but there could be several at the same time. The green cube shows a world chunk that has just been received from the farm.

The material editor allows to define the multiple layers that make each material:

These layers follow the same model I had introduced in an earlier post. They are rendered in real-time, although there are no shadows nor global illumination unless you perform a deeper render.

If you are only working on the materials there is no need to recompute the geometry of the scene, this ends up being a pretty neat and fast workflow.

If you want to make sure you are working on the right layer of terrain or material, you can always ask the program to highlight it. The following screenshot shows the same scene as before, but the "Volcanic Talus" layer appears highlighted in red:

In the future I will post more about this program. If I get enough time I will capture a video so you can see a quick session.

In the poll at the top of this site there is an option that reads "Content creation application (like WorldMachine)". This option has received one third of the votes compared to the most popular option. This is a lot of votes once you consider it is a tool and not a game like other entries in the poll. Voxel Studio is that application.

Like anything else in this project, I'm not sure if it will ever be released, but I'm closer to having this finished than a game or anything else. It could be a nice procedural creation suit, including both the studio and the farm. If you see yourself using an application like this, I would like to hear about what features you'd like on it. Please leave your suggestions as comments and we will sort out what is feasible and what is not.