Thursday, August 4, 2016

System Integration

Here is a scene that combines all the recent developments in Voxel Farm:


This integration is subtle. There are no giant turtle mountains here, but the same system we used for the giant turtle is applied here to produce the natural rock pillars that are connected by the bridges, also the platform where the pyramid rests:



These natural structures are defined by a low resolution mesh that captures the basic shape. This is expanded in realtime into detailed features like rocks, sand and dirt using procedural materials that we call Meta-materials.

The large terrain around the pillars and the pyramid's base is using Voxel Farm's standard procedural terrain.

This scene also uses UV-mapped voxels. This is a different method to apply textures to voxels. It allows much finer control. The entire pyramid is using them:


There is also the new instancing system, which is responsible for all the trees plants and rocks you see scattered around. You cannot see this in just screenshots, but this new system is able to preserve existing instances even in the event of user edits and destruction. This avoid the visible "replanting" of vegetation and rocks around edits.

And all this is running in Unreal Engine 4. I would say the UE4 integration is the last of the systems than went into taking these shots.




12 comments:

  1. Stunning! I love the pyramid texturing.

    I have not downloaded voxel farm, so I apologize if this question is uninformed. Do you expose any of your terrain generation tools through a programming API, or is it all through the graphical user interface depicted in several of your videos? If not, do you plan to make an API available at some point? I am interested in using the procedural terrain generation as an integral part of a game instead of using the tools for Content creation myself.

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    1. Everything used in this scene is accessible through a C++ API.

      It is the same API used by the creation UI you see in Voxel Studio videos. You could have your own UI and you would only need to hook up the API calls to your UI elements.

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  2. So were the bridges and the pyramid hand-made? Placed, but generated using your building grammar stuff, or something else?

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    1. Pyramid is handmade from a point cloud scan. The bridges were created in Maya. No grammars/LSystems here. These meshes were imported into Voxel Studio so they could be placed in their final locations.

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    2. So many systems to work with =P. You guys have a really nice tool suite here, and it just gets better with each iteration, keep up the good work I'd say =).

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  3. Hey Miguel! I know this is all about large scale world/environment creation and this is all super nice already! I wonder what about the small scale stuff in the near field? Of course I could imagine some better resolution offset-texture stuff. But also gravel and rubble creation and anything that nature puts around you. Something for that coming up? :]

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  4. I cant wait for that touchable demo, you promised in August release :P

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  5. Brilliant work! How about Unity integration? Is this all present on Unity too?

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    1. I would assume so, since their site: http://www.voxelfarm.com/index.html says "Our systems are integrated with mainstream game engines Unity and Unreal Engine."

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  6. Just excellent!

    Would you do a post on detail about the physics (not just gravity :P) of your engine? Im pretty interested how you managed them.

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