Landscape Architect

[J.C.Smith]

Looks great.

[AngeIV]

Doesn’t the UE4 procedural foliage tool already spawn foliage on top of meshes? such as voxels? Unless Your tool updates the foliage on landscape modification at runtime.

[motorsep]

Will this beauty work in VR ? :o

[Ali_Akbar]

@AngeIV;690015

Doesn’t the UE4 procedural foliage tool already spawn foliage on top of meshes? such as voxels? Unless Your tool updates the foliage on landscape modification at runtime.

From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t spawn grass and the procedural foliage tool doesn’t work at runtime, you simulate it from within the editor (didn’t get to this yet, need to check this)

As for the grass, it gets updated when you modify the mesh at runtime

[Ali_Akbar]

@motorsep;690017

Will this beauty work in VR ? :o

I couldn’t get my hands on a VR headset here in India, they don’t ship here. I guess I’ll have to settle for gear VR

[AngeIV]

I feal concerned with this no man sky direction. I rather see some examples of a tiled streamed world with world composition working. Just a personal opinion. (doesn’t mean that Your work on the planetary stuff is not pure 100% awesomeness! as it is!)
Not to lie to You. I got a budget. a handfull of devs at my disposal and we wish to build a sandbox rpg, nad this landscape is something that will save me a lot of money. however I would lvoe to see it work on “world composition”. that would be Epic. (see what I did there? ^^)

[Ali_Akbar]

@AngeIV;690087

I feal concerned with this no man sky direction. I rather see some examples of a tiled streamed world with world composition working. Just a personal opinion. (doesn’t mean that Your work on the planetary stuff is not pure 100% awesomeness! as it is!)
Not to lie to You. I got a budget. a handfull of devs at my disposal and we wish to build a sandbox rpg, nad this landscape is something that will save me a lot of money. however I would lvoe to see it work on “world composition”. that would be Epic. (see what I did there? ^^)

That will work when I get to the tooling part I’m focusing on the material system and internal optimizations for now

[Ali_Akbar]

@NightroGames;687275

Is this still going smoothly? As in, can we still expect an April release? If you still haven’t figured out a price, I’de gladly drop down $150 if it’s as great as I think it is and think it would be popular at that mid to high price point. Of course I would still be willing to pay more or less.

Also, any progress on getting it to work in editor and height maps to voxel for “caves/overhangs” etc? I need it to work with height maps I export from World Machine and then continue editing it from there. So I’m assuming that this wouldn’t work on pre-made landscapes yes?

@NightroGames It should be possible to convert height/weight map data of existing ue4 landscapes to voxels. I haven’t gotten to the editor tooling yet

[motorsep]

@;690079

I couldn’t get my hands on a VR headset here in India, they don’t ship here. I guess I’ll have to settle for gear VR

Nah, it won’t work in Gear VR. Landscape isn’t suitable for mobile in general.

The way I do my terrains for Gear VR is by making them in Blender (natively or using World Machine), slicing them into however many chunks, generating LODs for each chunk, transferring vertex normals from original pre-sliced mesh, baking maps and then exporting all that into UE4. It’s not a streamlined process, but it allows to have LODed terrains in Gear VR.

For this particular reason I am more interested in biome tools, to populate these terrains.

[NightroGames]

I don’t know if you are aware of it yet, but I found something that would be worth looking into to get ideas on improving your product. It’s called “Voxel Farm.” I haven’t found anything like a stamp feature yet, but improved material rendering did catch my attention.

I believe stuff are made in it’s own application then exported, but it recently came out with a UE4 plugin. I am mostly just interested in the landscape part of voxel though, and not Voxel Farm’s other stuff like it’s voxel dynamic water, it’s blocky Mincraft like architect, or it’s trees. If you don’t like me mentioning competitor products, I don’t mind removing this comment.

[LordStuff]

Hey, great job you did there!

I didn’t read the whole thread, but does this also support cube based voxel landscapes?

Cheers

[anonymous_user_30054aa5]

Hi Ali,

I hope you are well and the work goes as you want. I can’t wait to acquire and test your plugin.

Did you acheive to implement the material system you wanted? Have you began to work on the tooling?

I would like to share my personal opinion : Procedural generation is very fancy and impressive. It allows to create great demos and incredible screen-shot in no time but it can’t make a good game alone. Hand-crafted world are much more valuable in most case because they are an artistic expression and perfectly fit the gameplay goals. Few good games were able to take advantage of fully procedural biomes (Minecraft, Rust, no man’s sky). Few games need a 200km square landscape. And mixing generated and hand-made content is still a recurrent and unsolved problem for the procedural content generation industry.

So it’s totally awesome that your plugin can make such things, but I encourage you to focus at least as much on the in-editor tooling because I believe that there are tons of artists, out there, that can’t wait to sculpt, dig, paint and decorate in tiny details their (not-giant) level with their heart and a rich and versatile tool ^^ (Plus, a good in-editor tooling is exactly what is lacking the leading concurrent Voxel Farm )

Good luck and please, keep up the good work !

[iniside]

So when it is coming out ? (;.
I don’t know if you have been already on it but I have two suggestions:

1. Add mask input to all generators (so you can mask generator with output of other generator).
2. Add Layout node. You can place shapes over world (splines, circles, rectangles, custom shape) over world and they will generate simple gradient with falloff.
   Both of those features would allow to customize landscape (possibly at runtime too, by defining how shape will affect underlaying heightmap generation).

Can’t wait for it. Will you include source in plugin ?

[gotgrassct]

Can you have materials that are optimized for mobile? that would be amazing! for example: no tesselation, only 8 mobile texture samplers etc

[NightroGames]

@methusalah;701193

Hi Ali,

I hope you are well and the work goes as you want. I can’t wait to acquire and test your plugin.

Did you acheive to implement the material system you wanted? Have you began to work on the tooling?

I would like to share my personal opinion : Procedural generation is very fancy and impressive. It allows to create great demos and incredible screen-shot in no time but it can’t make a good game alone. Hand-crafted world are much more valuable in most case because they are an artistic expression and perfectly fit the gameplay goals. Few good games were able to take advantage of fully procedural biomes (Minecraft, Rust, no man’s sky). Few games need a 200km square landscape. And mixing generated and hand-made content is still a recurrent and unsolved problem for the procedural content generation industry.

So it’s totally awesome that your plugin can make such things, but I encourage you to focus at least as much on the in-editor tooling because I believe that there are tons of artists, out there, that can’t wait to sculpt, dig, paint and decorate in tiny details their (not-giant) level with their heart and a rich and versatile tool ^^ (Plus, a good in-editor tooling is exactly what is lacking the leading concurrent Voxel Farm )

Good luck and please, keep up the good work !

As someone who’s main program is Zbrush, I couldn’t agree more. Just need the landscape focused (UE4 dedicated) part of it. Plus Voxel Farm will require you to re-purchase it every 2 years for new engine support.

[anonymous_user_5565021c]

Was wondering if this will work in the forward renderer? (In VR and not)
does it need temporal AA to make the foliage look decent?

[anonymous_user_c5e4932b]

[MENTION=28980][/MENTION] Are you still looking at releasing soon? Would be very interested to use LA. Amazing Work.

[acatalept]

It was mentioned earlier in the thread that you’re interested in VR, but major headsets were not yet available in India. Looks like HTC Vive will be available very soon: http://www.amazon.in/HTC-VIVE-Virtual-Reality-System/dp/B06ZY6LJ2F

Good luck - patiently looking forward to this, take as long as you need

[Ali_Akbar]

Thank you @acatalept That’s very thoughful of you. Recently Amazon India started shipping Oculus Rift and I got mine last week

[Ali_Akbar]

@NightroGames;697742

I don’t know if you are aware of it yet, but I found something that would be worth looking into to get ideas on improving your product. It’s called “Voxel Farm.” I haven’t found anything like a stamp feature yet, but improved material rendering did catch my attention.

I believe stuff are made in it’s own application then exported, but it recently came out with a UE4 plugin. I am mostly just interested in the landscape part of voxel though, and not Voxel Farm’s other stuff like it’s voxel dynamic water, it’s blocky Mincraft like architect, or it’s trees. If you don’t like me mentioning competitor products, I don’t mind removing this comment.

Thanks for the update. I had a look at Voxel Farm a while ago and they have a great product

If you don’t like me mentioning competitor products, I don’t mind removing this comment

I don’t mind at all I’d gladly help a fellow developer even if you are working on a competing plugin. Since I started DA two years ago, I always maintained that you can look at my code and use it a as learning reference for your own plugins

I have a lot of interesting stuff planned for the editor tooling. I’ll have more info in a few days