Landscape Architect

[motorsep]

Some sort of biome generator would be needed for this system :o

[xShadeFleax]

When is the release and what kind of price tag are you placing on it?

[Havoc]

@Demenzun Media;665573

Too bad you won’t be able to use it and sell it.
Quoted from the GPU Gems license:

“The contents of this CD-ROM are intended for personal use only, unless otherwise addressed under a separate license.”

That is the limitation of what happens when you simply take code from open sources or published materials instead of creating your own.

Based on doesn’t mean lifted from.

[Nesjett]

@Demenzun Media;665573

Too bad you won’t be able to use it and sell it.
Quoted from the GPU Gems license:

“The contents of this CD-ROM are intended for personal use only, unless otherwise addressed under a separate license.”

That is the limitation of what happens when you simply take code from open sources or published materials instead of creating your own.

Plus that doesn´t mean you can´t get other kind of license from the autor.

[ioFlow_Studios]

Hey there Demenzun,

Normally I’d just ignore your comment as the ramblings of some anonymous 20 yr old hipster living in his moms basement.

But then I saw that you’re the dude who makes terresculptor which is totally awesome so I decided to take your concerns a little more seriously

As impressive as the nividia gpu gems stuff is, it’s just one implementation of the marching cubes algorithm (Marching cubes - Wikipedia).

Here’s an interesting cut and paste from that wikipedia page too:

Patent issues
An implementation of the marching cubes algorithm was patented as United States Patent 4,710,876.[7] Another similar algorithm was developed, called marching tetrahedra, in order to circumvent the patent as well as solve a minor ambiguity problem of marching cubes with some cube configurations. The patent expired in 2005, and it is now legal for the graphics community to use it without royalties since more than 17 years have passed from its issue date (December 1, 1987[7]).

You seem to be under the impression that any voxel based technology is untouchable due to licensing complications yet we live in an age where there are basically voxel based games on every street corner, what’s your take on that?

[NightroGames]

Really looking forward to this!!! Do you have an ETA?

And to think, I just bought World Machine and GeoGlyph 2.0. But this also offers unique designs and easy caves!

[xShadeFleax]

@Demenzun Media;665670

Give me a break guys. That is not how the law works.
Even if his code is 80% the same, we know he copied it from that source, so he will need a license.
The license is plainly visible on the GPU Gems book and CD before anyone even starts copying the code or “basing” their code on it.
He has to get permission from NVidia.
The same goes for all of the rest of the code that he has lifted from the Internet.
If any of it is copied or “based on” code that has non-commercial licenses or is open-source non-commercial, he can’t use it in a commercial application, or he has to try to get a commercial use license from the author/owner.

He is ok and not breaking any laws. We realize that he is now officially a competitor to you, (I like terresculptor… for heightmaps), but ioFlow Studios is correct. That said, I hope you can come up with something similar and give us a secondary option; because as it sits, I can’t seem to get a splat map off Terresculptor, much less carve out a cave in it. Again, good work, needs to join the tetrahedra club now.

[Ali_Akbar]

@Demenzun Media;665670

Even if his code is 80% the same, we know he copied it from that source, so he will need a license.

Really? How did you come to that conclusion? Stop spreading FUD

Like @Havoc said, it is based on the explanation and all implementation is my own and I didn’t take anything from the CD. I quote it because that was the first excellent introduction/explanation on voxel based engine for me

For implementation, I use Paul Brouke’s article, which has a public domain code example, mostly for the lookup table, and that is a very small part of what I have coded

[Ali_Akbar]

@Demenzun Media;665752

Splatmaps (RGBA channel masks) are coming to TerreSculptor shortly. Right after the Heightmap Split feature, that is coming next.
For now, you can save Extracted masks as PNG etc. and combine them by layer in Photoshop etc. to get an RGB channel splatmap.

Do your marketing on your own thread

[anonymous_user_adcf0aef]

@;665756

Do your marketing on your own thread

Keep up the good work Ali. I’m looking forward to Landscape Architect!

[XTRMtrouble]

Is this plugin available somewhere?

[Hevedy]

This is nice but got a question, is possible to edit the terrain like the normal landscape in editor ? I would like to see if this can store the info in the map and save it and edit and that like the sculpt tools of the landscape brushes and working in the 3 axis ?

[ioFlow_Studios]

It’s an interesting topic, how much editing you can do in editor and how much you do at runtime, especially with procedural stuff.

If you think about it though, editing in game can be a workable solution as long as the changes are saved persistently to some sort of db.

That way when you return to the editor, you just have to tell the terrain to update from the db?

How does your voxel stuff work ali?

[PerseusSmith]

@ShadeFlea;665737

He is ok and not breaking any laws. We realize that he is now officially a competitor to you, (I like terresculptor… for heightmaps), but ioFlow Studios is correct. That said, I hope you can come up with something similar and give us a secondary option; because as it sits, I can’t seem to get a splat map off Terresculptor, much less carve out a cave in it. Again, good work, needs to join the tetrahedra club now.

To avoid licencing issues, perhaps rethinking your business model and API implementation.
I recall Android vs iOS, where both operating systems have bouncy effects. One algorithm involves a physics based model, while the other is a mathematical.

[PerseusSmith]

@ioFlow Studios;666278

It’s an interesting topic, how much editing you can do in editor and how much you do at runtime, especially with procedural stuff.

If you think about it though, editing in game can be a workable solution as long as the changes are saved persistently to some sort of db.

That way when you return to the editor, you just have to tell the terrain to update from the db?

How does your voxel stuff work ali?

Saving it to some cloud based db would be ideal, perhaps a 10 minute cycling save window similar to bitcoin may work.

[hippowombat]

Couldn’t you save the voxel info to a sql table or something similar?

[Ali_Akbar]

@mid_gen;660490

Just saw this on youtube. Awesome work, puts my efforts to shame!

@mid_gen I love what you did with your plugin. Thank you for giving the community Cashgen

[Xodroc]

Was following this earlier and wow, lots of progress. Next thing we know you’ll have a solution to create a massive Star Citizen style universe!

A few questions, though I’m almost afraid to ask them as I wouldn’t want to cause a “just one more feature” delay.

Are you able to “bake” a heightmap based terrain into Voxels or use them together seamlessly? For example to create an underground voxel cave system beneath a heightmap? Being able to create terrain “stamps” would be awesome for both heightmap and voxel projects. The default landscape editor lets you copy/paste areas I know, but I’m thinking in terms of building a library of stamps.

I noticed multiplayer is on your roadmap, how is that coming along? It would be awesome to have EverQuest Landmark(or better) style multiplayer Voxel worlds. In 4.14 There is an experimental Multiplayer World Origin Rebasing feature thanks to nkey.

I don’t know if I’ll even be worried about it, but is there a way to export a section of heightmap to work on in an external app and easily reimport it while still being able to “stitch” terrains back together?

I know you can import external heightmaps, what about importing splat maps used to define where different materials should be, as well as maps defining where procedural foliage/rocks should spawn?

That hover-bike video gave me flashbacks to Star Wars Galaxies. With that in mind, would it be possible to have a building/object placement system that will automatically flatten and raise/lower terrain to match the object being placed? I know that goes a little beyond terrain building.

Would love it if we could build/paint Voxel worlds while in VR. That would be like a game in itself.

Keep up the good work, can’t wait to see this.

[Ali_Akbar]

@kelfire;661660

@ Amazing work so far. Have you seen the work flow for editing landscape for D.R.O.N.E? I’ll post a link below. It has probably the best landscape workflow I seen out of any game. The stamp and paint ability allows for really quick blocking of the terrain system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8o2H-GOdlE

@kelfire Thanks for the link. That editor is awesome. I’ll be adding stamp support as well. When designing the toolset, I’m thinking of an architecture where the tools will work at both runtime and within the editor

The tools code will reside in the runtime module and wouldn’t know/care where it is running (runtime or editor). Only the user interface implementation needs to be created for each of the modules (a basic UMG UI with comes with LA for runtime editing, which you can modify or extend to suit your game’s art style) and an editor UI in Slate for modifications withing UnrealEd

[Ali_Akbar]

@motorsep;665481

Some sort of biome generator would be needed for this system :o

I can’t start that until there is a good material system in place (so different materials can be used for different biomes).

For the material system, I’m looking at Material Layer Blending. For now I’ll use some simple 3D noise to generate biomes and pass that information to the mesh vertex in a separate UV channel. That data would eventually be used from the material to switch between different biome material functions using layer blending