VizWorld.com

One result from Unity’s “Summer of Code” project is now available as Sandor Moldan’s “Terrain Toolkit 1.0″.  From his own description:

Unity already has a powerful terrain engine as one of its core features. The Terrain Toolkit expands on this by providing the user with the ability to rapidly create a variety of different landscapes directly within Unity without needing to use third party software. An additional advantage is that landscapes can now be generated dynamically at runtime. This means a Unity game can have a potentially infinite number of levels or landscapes with a negligible impact on the file size.

Basically it adds procedural terrain generation algorithms and UI tool to Unity, letting you get away from manually modeling & importing terrain in other packages.  A welcome addition to a continually growing product.

via Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » Summer of Code: Terrain Toolkit Released!.

Science software, terrain, unity

StarScene’s procedural terrain and texture generator ‘Fractscape’ has just hit version 1.5, with an impressive collection of features:

• A variety of controls for roughness, size, height, etc.
• Load in or draw heightmaps to control the basic shape of the terrain
• Adjustable auto-texturing based on height and slope
• Terrain resolution up to 4097×4097, texturemap resolution up to 2048×2048
• Virtually unlimited undo/redo of almost everything, so you can always go back to that cool landscape you just had
• Load/save even the largest terrains as small Fractscape files — everything is procedurally generated
• Export them as 8 or 16 bit heightmaps, or as .obj meshes (triangles or quads)
• Export texturemap as 4-channel .tiff splatmap, or as a solid-shaded .png
• Explore terrains from a first-person view for an up-close look

The software is built using Unity, and therefore the resulting terrains work great with it.  The software is available free, but a $20 registration is required to unlock file export.

via Starscene Software – Fractscape.

Graphics fractal, fractscape, procedural, software, starscene, terrain

On the GameDev forums, a user by the name of “sylvestre” has posted code and videos of a project he developed to allow real-time visualization of 3.6GB of terrain data.

I finally made a demo version of the software I used in this post. If you have enough space and time to download 3.6GB of terrain data, you may try it on your PC (warning: it has only been tested on Windows XP, with an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 or 8800). The demo is available here:

http://evasion.inrialpes.fr/~Eric.Bruneton/demo.html

Otherwise you can see some High Quality videos here (made with more precise data and more realistic shaders – 16GB terrain, clouds, shadows, procedural details):

He’s using data from the Nasa Earth Observatory, which offers 500 meter/pixel resolution, and the STRM v4 from CIAT, which offers 90m per pixel.  Very impressive stuff.  See a video of the system in use (running at 150fps) after the break.

via realistic Earth rendering demo – GameDev.Net Discussion Forums.

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Science realtime, terrain

Grome2, the popular outdoor modeling suite from Quad Software, has just been released and boasts several impressive features.

• New layers such as Terrain, Water, and vegetation
• Faster processing for bigger scenes
• Move advanced fractal and erosion algorithms
• New plugins and formats
• and more.

If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend you go check out their site.  The examples they have online are breathtaking.

Quad Software | Technology that makes it simple.

Graphics grome2, modeling, outdoor, quad, software, terrain