The Eden Project

You are still working on this, right?

Yep :slight_smile:

Bit slow because I’m juggling between a few different things, but I just migrated everything into 4.24 the other weekend.

Fwiw, the bit I’m up to is integrating virtual texturing via antigrain geometry so that we’re not stuck with that bare moon look.

Looking forward to 4.25 with all the rumours about volumetric clouds for spherical worlds, but I guess we’ll see if that happens…

Aight.

Well, first of all, hello there :slight_smile:

So I been indulging in a bit of necromancy to see if I get this stuff up and going again.

Actually had a monster day yesterday, got a mountain of work done (pardon the pun).

Implemented a Truche(ish) pattern, looks like this:


Then a bit of noise to displace the position of the vertices before I feed em into the thingy that uses their position to generate the pattern:


Then same thing again but a bunch smaller:

But then there’s the problem that all the mountain peaks are at the same height:

So then I add a bit of vertical noise to break that up:

Doesn’t look amazing from up here because the lod is overly aggressive, but down on ground with a bit of tweaking and fiddling you get nice views like this:

Anyways, I’m a bit stuck, thought I might post some stuff in case someone can help me.

When I play in editor, the procedural mesh doesn’t render. The collision is there (I can run on it), it casts shadows, you just can’t see it :\

To make it weirder, if I eject, it shows up… any tips/clues?

Ah… got it.

Got some black magic off Phryonnaz for doing in editor updates of the planet LOD focal point… seems to be causing it.

Bit of googling should bring it right.

Lots of popping between LOD octaves, that’s tomorrow nights problem :slight_smile:

Yah, I think Xenthorx is the front runner atm :slight_smile:

Haven’t heard anything from Dexy in a while…

Phyronnaz’s voxel plugin is pretty amazing too.

As for me, Imma gonna play around see if I can code some better LODing, those basic geometry clip maps just lose detail too quickly.

Yay, new data structure for new lod code:

Trying to prevent sampling noise from the same spot, so when a quad splits it inherits existing samples from its parent (P) or siblings (S), what it can’t get from them it has to create (C).

Aight, long time no post :slight_smile:

I am, believe it or not, still working on this… if anything the situation this year has put it ahead of traditional distractions (i.e. playing live music). Anyways, I try to hold off posting here unless I’ve got something decent to show, but after half killing myself this weekend I’ve got some fairly critical tests going:

Still pretty rough, but basically the idea is this:
Fitting rivers and roads to procedurally generated terrain is way hard, instead of doing it at the end, why not do it at the start?

Problem with doing it in a material though is that you have to then try and translate that displacement into world positions so that you can do things like travel down the river or drive along roads. This was unpleasantly difficult to figure out (made much worse by the fact that I forgot to turn sRGB off in my noise texture) but I seem to be getting it under control now :slight_smile:

The test map is only 1k, but the idea is that I can just regenerate it on the fly in the lods of my planet mesh as they move around the surface making it basically infinite. As you can see at the start the base texture is just simple tetris shapes and lines and primitives (easy to generate), it’s the displacement that makes them look more natural.

Aight, this is not very glamorous yet, but I’ve literally spent years trying to get to this point so gosh darn it I’m posting screenshots.

So here we got a dynamic texture… using the antigrain plugin that I’ve cobbled together, I can draw bsplines in it.

And now I can also draw patterns along them, so I’ve coded a uv square pattern generator.

The whole point is that I can feed this into a material and use the pattern above to generate uv coordinates for another texture, like this:

yah yah, I know it’s rough, but hey it’s a functional test not an artwork, the cosmetic side can easily be tarted up from here.

Anyways, you might have noticed in the last video that the “roads” were overly sqiggly little green lines, now they can be proper looking roads :slight_smile:

Thumbs up on progress! And persistence! :slight_smile:

Looks good io :slight_smile:

Ho ho ho everyone, merry christmas :slight_smile:

Also, I done made this quick video of some tests I’m doing with procedural (mesh) star fields.

My existing galaxy is missing several zeroes in it’s star count, so now each star in it will instead be one of these star cluster cells:

P.S. thank you star citizen for annoying me so badly with all your bugs that I got off my bum and got back into this.

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lol, “schedule”… heh heh heh.

I just keep chipping away cos it’s interesting to work on.

When I need a break I just do something else for a month or two.

Re SC, atm it’s not being able to retrieve vehicles or ships, specially if you done RENTED them.

That feeling when you just about pop an eyeball getting something going, but then once you get it going it’s not as good as you thought it would be.

I mean, it looks pretty as a pic, but in 3d moving around it’s way too noisy with all the routes turned on :\

Oops.

Think I accidentally did something clever.

I just maxed out the route thickness and turned down their opacity and emission…

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Aaand here’s a version that’s all boxed up to run as an in game view of a star cluster…

Fire Truck.

There’s a bug in the shader compilation that won’t let me compile my cool nebula volume based materials in 4.26 :frowning:

I figured out how to remake my nebula materials using 3d textures instead of shader based noise:

As you can see in the video, I’m using Salmonick Ateliers work as a goal.

I think I got the same look and feel but I’m not Ryan Bruck clever enough to emulate that fine detail…