Fractscape

Holy necropost, Batman! (It's OK to necropost your own topic, right?) Fractscape 1.6 is available now, so if you have Mavericks and were not happy to find that Fractscape stopped running, well, it should work again. Thanks to a rebuild with Unity 4. While I was at it I did an actual update too, with some polishing and bugfixing and stuff. Also there's a Linux version now. The only potential downside is that files saved with older versions of Fractscape tend to result in somewhat different terrains, due to not being able to use Random.Range in threads anymore for some reason, so I had to use a different method which doesn't give the same results.

--Eric

 

Nice tool XD
Is there any way to cut off at sea level, and not save anything below that, so it doesn't necessarily make a square mesh?

 

Terrains aren't meshes at all, they're heightmaps, so it's required that they are square. You could potentially use a depthmask shader on a plane to mask out stuff below the plane.

--Eric

 

I was saving them out as mesh obj files, not using them as terrains - which is why I wondered if they could be cut off at sea level, rather than continuing. I'm making sky-islands, and this is almost the perfect tool for the job. If I can cut off the area below sea level, it would be 100% the perfect tool for sky-islands.

 

Sure, if you're exporting as .obj, then you can cut the meshes off at sea level in whatever 3D modeling app you're using.

--Eric

 

Can it be used to dynamically import terrain from a file on the file system at runtime? Or is this purely for in-editor use?

 

Neither; it's a stand-alone app.

--Eric

 

Hi, Eric.

Sorry to necro, but after hours of Googling, this post of yours was the closest to what I'm looking for. You mentioned Fractscape had a feature to clamp borders of an existing terrain to the same height. Does Fractscape still do this? Is there another tool that might do this as well?

 

Yep, still does it.

--Eric

 

Thank you for the reply. Tried the demo, but cannot seem to import 1:1 (or anything remotely close). Always comes in looking like a generic terrain with some random noise creating mounds everywhere, and not the detailed island terrain I exported as .raw from Unity.

 

The main idea of Fractscape is that it's not supposed to be the same and that if you import a heightmap it's an influencer, but in those cases where you want the heightmap as-is, change the h.map res in the controls to be the same as the terrain res.

--Eric

 

Not sure if this is helpful at all, but here's the ApplySplatmap script ported to CS

I also changed the check from ARG32 to RGBA32, since that's the option I'm getting in latest Unity.

 

Getting this error when trying to save the .fractscape file, any thoughts?

 

It does a try/catch when opening a Streamwriter for saving that file, so that's an OS error. Some searching suggests a possible cause could be not having correct file permissions. Does it work if you try saving somewhere else?

--Eric

 

I'm trying to import a PNG heightmap I made in photoshop. Fractscape say "The file doesn't seem to be a valid PNG file". What's valid to Fractscape ? Is there a size limit maybe ?

 

That specific error only occurs if the width is 8, which is a hack to deal with the fact that the WWW class doesn't have a good way to deal with some errors (it makes a 8x8 "question mark" texture in that case rather than returning an error). So it's possible you're attempting to use a width of 8, but if not, then it means something went wrong and Unity can't load the PNG file. If you're saving it from Photoshop normally, try exporting for the web instead. Although really you're better off using a raw file anyway. Other than that, make sure you've read the part in the docs about importing heightmaps.

--Eric

 

Hi Eric, thanks for your response.
I was trying to import a height map in Fractscape, not Unity. So the error is in Fractscape.
Finally I imported my height map in Unity instead, which worked.

 

Yes, I know...that's what I was replying to. I programmed Fractscape using Unity.

--Eric

 

Is Fractscape no more? If not where to find it?

 

It's no more, sorry.

--Eric