Fractscape 1.2 released

Finally! Available here. Sorry for the huge delay...a combination of burnout from Fractscape 1.0/1.1, lack of time from working on other things, and some old fashioned laziness thrown in for good measure.

What's new, from the version history:

• Can draw heightmaps inside Fractscape now by clicking the draw button on the right, instead of having to load them (loading is still supported of course)
• Can set the resolution of heightmaps in the Controls tab: the closer to the terrain resolution this is, the more influence the heightmap has on the terrain--if the heightmap is the same resolution as the terrain, no fractal detail is added (this can be useful if you just want to auto-texture an already existing heightmap, for example)

Those are the "big" things. Drawing heightmaps in Fractscape made more of a difference than I thought; you could always import them from another app, but having it real-time is just better. Should have done that ages ago.... Also:

• Max resolution for imported heightmaps is 4097 instead of 1025, and aside from that limitation, the resolution can be anything (rather than power of two plus one), as long as width and height are the same
• Progress bar for terrain/texture/preview computations (also some speedups for these)
• Various improvements in the file requester, such as being able to use arrow keys and mouse scrollwheel
• Implemented framerate cap in the preferences; this can lower CPU time used by Fractscape when it's not actively computing terrains
• Guidelines for texture heights etc. now work with the detail terrain view
• Filename and saved status are now displayed at the top of the screen
• Better support for old graphics cards
• Some bugfixes

Also the ApplySplatmap script is included if you don't already have it from elsewhere. The original Fractscape topic is here if you haven't seen it. Basically, Fractscape is a way to make high-res, detailed landscapes in a matter of minutes or even seconds, without having to manually draw in all the little bumps, hills, and valleys, plus it auto-textures the terrain based on various parameters, so you can apply that as a splatmap in Unity. This can give you very nice results and saves a huge amount of time, plus you can then touch up the heightmap and texturing in Unity afterward as needed. Also it's just fun to mess with...well, I think so anyway, even when I get tired of programming it (6200+ lines of code so far, woot).

Plus the documentation is updated, of course, and I added a Quick Start guide if you're not familiar with Fractscape and want to get some results into Unity quickly.

Let me know if you find any bugs or annoyances. There are still a couple of niggles for me, but if I kept fixing niggles I was never going to get 1.2 out.... Still no erosion filter, sorry; I started on one a while ago but it was too slow and never worked right so I gave up on it. I'll try a different method next time.

--Eric

 

Congratulations on finishing this big update. One small thing left, the link on your website needs to be updated. It still links to version 1.1.2

 

Actually the link was updated and works fine (I tested it a couple of times earlier because I'm always paranoid about that), but I neglected to update the title of the link. So that's fixed, thanks! If that wasn't the issue, you might have to reload the web page.

--Eric

 

I played with it a little and I have to say it's really great. Very intuitive and fun to create heightmaps.

I was wondering, from what I could read on your website, it's possible to export the terrain as an obj file. How many polygons does that make for a very small terrain (of size 100)?

The reason I ask is because I'm going to need that kind of terrains for an iPhone game and was wondering if a very small terrain wouldn't be too intensive for the iPhone?

If the amount of poly is reasonable, I'll definitely buy this app!

 

Thanks! Keep in mind that resolution and size are two different things--you can have a 100x100 resolution terrain cover 2km x 2km of area if you like, or any other arbitrary size. Heightmaps generally have powers of two for the dimensions, with each heightmap pixel resulting in two triangles. So a 64x64 terrain would end up as 8192 polygons. A 128x128 terrain would be 32,768 polygons, which would be excessive for the iPhone. If you look at terrains used in existing iPhone apps, like XPlane, they're very low-res, so probably you'd want to use 32x32 (2048 polygons) or 64x64. Again, you can scale heightmaps to any size you want without affecting the number of polygons.

--Eric

 

I see. Thanks for the answer.

I know what to get myself for Christmas then

 

Well actually if you don't have much else in your scene other than pickups and other low poly things you can do a higher res. terrain. I've got one that is ~8k polys and it works fine.

 

Looks great Eric! Congrats on the update.

 

Cool. Look forward to messin' with this Eric, thanks!
AaronC

 

I've just uploaded Fractscape 1.3. This is a relatively minor release:

• Implemented version checking in the preferences. If you set it to auto-check, it will always check for a new version at start-up (assuming an active internet connection); otherwise you can check manually by clicking the "Check now" button
• Can use right mouse button for a secondary height when heightmap painting. This makes it easy to, for example, draw with the left button and erase with the right button
• Brush size for heightmap painting is visually shown when using the size slider, if the mouse pointer is over the slider when changing the value
• Selecting a height with the eyedropper toggles the eyedropper off instead of leaving it selected
• Can use left and right mouse buttons in walk mode to speed up (works like using shift and control, respectively)

--Eric