Assets [Outdated thread] Map Magic

Any suggestion on how to smooth my maps out?

 

rpg_gamer, biomes seems to be the most requested feature, so I plan to start implementing it soon

Wizzard033, since raw image is 16-bit per channel map you can blur it in image editor to avoid stepness or overhead from the blur generator. 16-bit map should store gradients without problems.

 

Hey Wright,

This 1.0 version made most of my dreams come true. It is truly outstanding work. I was doing something similar and when I saw how far you've gone with MM, I may just abandon my own code and adopt yours!

But now on to the real questions I have:

1. Can I specify a random seed that can rebuild the terrain with a really different randomness? I'm hoping for better randomness than a simple XY offset, because I found that mountain ranges are quite distinct, and players can recognize them even when offset is different.

2. I'm designing a game with key map locations that are randomly placed (which does some math to level out the terrain in a radius around it). They are randomly placed so the player won't know where the key locations are each time, thus making each map more replayable. This is not the same as your "pinning" which always places the custom terrains in a specific place (players would know exactly where the locations are each time). I want the key locations to occur in random locations for game replayability. Those locations have specific terrain requirements. Is this possible?

3. You talk about Biomes. I don't exactly know what you mean. Are they the solution to my question 2? And furthermore, is the concept of a biome something like a custom terrain tile that blends into the procedural stuff?

4. I don't see any water (lakes or oceans) in your screenshots. I assume that using cutoff values and/or heightmask type nodes will allow you to create a nice shoreline and ocean? Could you please post a screenshot to show this working?

5. Some of your screenshots have grass jutting out through rocks. I have the same problem in my own project. Do you have any way to mask the grass based on the rock placement?

Thanks in advance! And once again, great work

 

Thanks! I really appreciate it!
Btw odd that you mention version 1.0. What's with the 1.1? Is it ok?

Changing the global seed changes all of the generators randomness. It's not an offset, you will get absolutely unique cliffs, however the algorithm will remain the same. Biomes is a feature that can go further in terrain variation: with it's help you can blend different prepared algorithms (like desert, mountains, plains, etc).

I like the idea of non-constant key locations, although I don't quite understand how do they should blend with the other terrains. For example, if the location is placed on the slope of the hill, how could it be placed in a valley or on mountain top? Should there be some heuristic analyzer that will try to find a proper terrain to place location? And what if there is no such a place at all?

Speaking about water - I'm making an extensive tutorial of creating a big procedural island (10*10 km). There will be a water and a shores, beaches. I'll make some screens when there will be something to shot.

You can use stamp generator to remove grass under the rocks. I though that it's a little thing, but since you've noticed it I'd rather add stamp generator in demo.

 

We made a very simple way of flattening all around the key locations. But that takes away a lot of the beauty of the terrain because it basically just gaussian blurs the heightmap in a radius around the key location. Like you mention the mountain top - it gets melted in an ugly way which I don't have a solution for right now. Anyway, we drop the key location (usually a house/building) on that spot. Then we apply grass and other decorations to cover up the bald, round-looking terrain.

Finding a suitable place to drop it is a much cooler idea, but has the problems you described. I sent you a PM (conversation) about it.

In any case, if you have any good idea for a solution, or plan on doing anything similar, let me know.

 

Also, really looking forward to the new demo scene!

 

Hi Denis, I have purchased your erosion brush asset before and just found Map Magic. It looks really good. There seems to be a lot of good tools coming out lately for us terrain fans. Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks a lot! It's nice to hear that I'm doing a good job!

 

That is SUPER cool and quite perfect!!

This just became a must-have, bravo man.

 

Thanks so much! I'm really glad to hear that MM is appreciated that way!

 

Hi Denis,

I need to place big city on a flat surface on a specific location that is determined procedurally at runtime.
Can you recommend anything to achieve such a thing ?
I tried stamp and blur nodes but did not work.

Thank you so much.

 

Let me clarify it: you need a city with a constant position, which is surrounded by auto-generated wilederness, or you need it's position to be changed each time player starts a new game (or selects a new seed in any other way)?

 

Actually, I need to place two or more big cities on an infinite terrain. These cities have coordinates separately. According to these coordinates during the scene start these cities' actual world positions are calculated. These positions can be very distant from each other. So I need to alter terrain formations as flat surfaces in specific positions and specific area size of a given city. Every time all terrain formations and cities should look the same.
..

 

A possible solution come to my mind:
- a custom generator which takes input map,blur factor and array of object world positions and area sizes to be flattened
- somehow access this generator input from scripts and supply the start positions and area sizes
- generator should know somehow that it's map output will be generated for which part of the terrain(terrain game object's transform position)
- if generator will produce a map for a city location then it will flat the necessary chunks of the map

Is it possible or sensible such a solution ?

 

Kia ora

I'm finding this easy to use and a great way to get a heightmap image in too thanks for another great tool

Is there a node I can use to bring in a red, blue and green splatmap mask to filter the textures I'm finding I can use slopes as you show but I didn't figure out how to use those to limit the height of a texture, even a node like the slope node that does height would be great, that way we could limit the grass (for example) from going below sea level, or a node with both height and slope so we can have say: sand from 0 to 20 height, 0 to 15 slope and dirt from 10 to 30 height, 20 to 30 slope tweak the range and blend then nicely. If this can be done with curves, OK, just need to figure out how

 

@Wright is there some way to have terrains active based off of multiple cameras (multiple players) ?

 

protoshape, you can use the stamp generator to flatten a land around some position (object), and then place a city prefab here with an object output generator.

Kiwi-Hawk, you can adjust the height map with a curves (to make it 100% above the sea level, and 0% below the sea), and then multiply this map with your slope using the blend generator.
The curve will look like this:

​

Stanchion, MM generates terrain using a main camera position only. Generating terrains for 10 (for instance) players will be ten times longer, and it will display ten times more terrains, which is surely will not improve a performance. What is the reason of one client to generate the terrains that are used by the other client only?

 

@Wright thank you Sir

 

When you have server authoritative multiplayer, you need to simulate all client players on the server. Clients would still only generate the terrain around their player.

 

I've finished the comprehensive tutorial showing the creation of this island from scratch:

I hope you will find it useful since it's showing the most typical generator use cases and guides through all of the creation process from the beginning to the end. And I believe it worth watching a hour and a half.

Note that since I was making an edits and enhancements to MM during the creation of the tutorial it describes a bit more advanced version than the currently available v.1.1. I plan to submit the new version today, and it will be available after Unity review.

Tutorial link

 

Can you add animals to this? I would like to have forest animals walking around when a new map is generated.

I already have purchased MapMagic asset which is amazing! Trying to see how I can add animals to the scene procedurally using map magic.

 

I think a better idea would be a generic GameObject spawner. It is not MapMagic's focus to include animal assets. That is what other asset store assets are for. But the ability to sprinkle any GameObject on the map based on rules would be wonderful.

 

That would get the job done!

 

That is exactly what the Object Output does. You can use it to spawn any object, from a stone to the mob like animal, monster or npc. I saw one of the users spawned flocks of crowns with it

 

Thanks for an amazing!, simple amazing tutorial.

Does this mean I could take my Island (20kx20k or 40kx40k say) and split it into 4 tiles as a 4096x4096 heightmap or even 8192x8192 heightmap pin the tiles and only load each quad as the player get close meaning better rez and detail

 

That's right. But I'd like to recommend you using more than 4 terrains with lesser resolutions to make the terrains generate gradually when player approaches them. 1024 seems to be the golden mean.

 

Hey all, I've played for a little bit with the demo version and am super impressed. For my project, I'd like to be able to modify seed values for specified nodes when a game starts (i.e. new world, same parameters). Is there an easy or at least documented way for accessing/modifying a node's seed values at runtime (or for that matter, all seed values for all nodes)?

Also, it might be a nice overall script toggle to have all node seeds change every scene-load as a built-in option also. Just an extra thought.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

 

Also some people need to load a saved game and need the same seed as last time, or waiting for the host of a multiplayer game to send the seed then generating the terrain. I assume you can just disable the Map Magic script on the prefab, change the seed value on the prefab at runtime, and enable it .

 

There's no need to change each of the generators seed value - you can use a global seed instead. Changing the global seed will make a new unique world using the same generation algorithms.
You can set global seed using MM's object "seed" value:

Code (CSharp):

1. MapMagic.instance.seed = 1234;

 

Neat! And that's WAY simpler than the alternative of trying to change individual seeds.

 

I'm really liking Map Magic But I was going crazy trying to figure out why I couldn't get grass to appear. It worked fine on a previous terrain in another scene.

It turned out that my terrain having a size of 500 and a resolution of 512 was the problem. The size has to be larger or exactly the same as the resolution or no grass appears. You can still paint it on but Map Magic won't do it.

I didn't run into this in the previous Map Magic version. Is this a bug?

Also, on a similar topic, would it be possible to have separate control over the "Heightmap Resolution", "Detail Resolution" and "Control Texture Resolution"? Because right now they're all together under the "Resolution" control. Unless something about the way the system works means they all have to be linked

 

Hi Denis,

Please consider adding spherical noise. That would help when generating planets.

Also there are situations where we'd like to render distant terrains anyway. Like when a spaceship is approaching a planet.
Performance would be better if there was a "bypass" parameter that would turn off a generator node (like fine-grained details or erosion). One of the possible triggers would be distance from the main camera.

References:
http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/tutorial8.html
http://computergraphics.stackexchan...w-can-i-generate-procedural-noise-on-a-sphere
http://vterrain.org/Textures/spherical.html

 

Great asset you have created here! I just purchased this today and having fun playing around with it.

I'm experimenting with multiplayer and using the spawn objects to place spawn locations. It works and there are random locations to spawn into. What exactly are you using to keep the trees out of the water? As I see some of the spawn locations under water.

It's also pretty cool to watch the scene view when another player is loaded in as it does not render the terrain there. They are just floating in space haha.

 

I'm getting this error (using Unity 5.4 b16):

EnsureRunningOnMainThread is not allowed to be called during serialization, call it from Awake or Start instead. Called from MonoBehaviour 'MapMagic' on game object 'Map Magic'.
See "Script Serialization" page in the Unity Manual for further details.

And:

UnityException: EnsureRunningOnMainThread is not allowed to be called during serialization, call it from Awake or Start instead. Called from MonoBehaviour 'MapMagic' on game object 'Map Magic'.
See "Script Serialization" page in the Unity Manual for further details.
UnityEngine.Object.GetInstanceID () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Export/UnityEngineObject.cs:31)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValue (System.Type type, System.String name, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:114)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:274)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValue (System.Type type, System.String name, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:121)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:263)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValues (System.Type elementType, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:140)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:245)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValue (System.Type type, System.String name, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:121)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:263)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValue (System.Type type, System.String name, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:121)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:263)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValue (System.Type type, System.String name, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:121)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:263)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValues (System.Type elementType, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:140)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:245)
MapMagic.Serializer+SerializedObject.GetValue (System.Type type, System.String name, MapMagic.Serializer ser) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:121)
MapMagic.Serializer.Retrieve (Int32 num) (at Assets/MapMagic/Main/Serializer.cs:263)
MapMagic.MapMagic.OnAfterDeserialize () (at Assets/MapMagic/MapMagic.cs:677)

 

Is it possible to use a solve the problem with cliff textures not wraping arount mountains?
Like, using a triplanar shader? Does Voxeland's shader work?

See attached image.

 

Cool generator but profiling the trial I see that you use coroutine instead of task or threads to generate that stuff. At least I see a giant Coroutine.Next spike. Care to explain why you don't use true threading?

 

Trees to rotate to allow impostors to be re-used for all the trees.

 

MM uses the "true" threading to generate all of the data.

But threads cannot interact with terrains, as well as other Unity objects. So the generated data like float[,] for height or float[,,] for splats is applied in main thread, and it is done in coroutine to minimize an apply lag.

The apply happens in the end of the generate, to make sure that MM uses threads try to profile it in the middle of the generate process.

 

I believe you, I'm just surprised that it takes so long to build a 500x500 terrain.
Do you feed the terrain all at once or frame by frame? Back in 2008 feeding the terrain by small chunks wasn't causing any hiccup (I say hiccup because there was no profiler either)

 

Dumb question but Can this be used to build low-poly style with vertex color ?

 

Hi

I have recently started using MapMagic and i am very impressed so far. I have been trying to get it to work in conjunction with Relief Terrain Pack. I understand currently you are only able to use RTP when pinning terrains, this doesn't work in an infinite world scenario. Has anyone looked at integrating RTP with MapMagic?

 

Nice, Looks like World Machine will pick this up at the end of the month!

Your Tutorial is Great!

 

Hi Denis,
After watching your tutorial I was very impressed so I purchased this asset today but I've run straight into a problem. I cannot get the project to build when I target "Windows Store, Universal 10" player, which is a deal-breaker for my scenario.

Build error log is attached. I'd love to work with you to get Windows Store supported.

Thanks!

-Matt

 

Hi I opened map magic and know this is just a beggining, so maybe these changes are planned. But as I worked with world machine, i am missing in your asset work with RGB(A) textures - operations with textures are simple in comparison what you have done... so believe this could be easy to do. Why color textures? Some terrain assets use splatmaps and colormaps. With your asset i can do it only via exporting mask and making ton of work in photoshop completing. Then i do not have feedback what i have done... so i really need these features to be able to make terrain with benefits of powerful shaders.

Absolutely Missing:
-texture input/output.
- constant Color generator- (simple color texture, masked)
- texture generator (with channel inputs - e.g. you can send height data from terrain into each channel)
- multiply, mix (slider for strength of operation)

less important:
- select color - create mask from color (with range, smooth)
- normal map import/creation/export.

Also what I am missing is texture preview window on any step. To see how approximately it look likes. There is a preview, but it is inactive... so maybe it is done, i will do research if i am doing something wrong. Well and it would be also good to add math functions also for height textures e.g.

- combine (+/-/* effect)
- invert

thanks

 

decktwelve, I'll take a look why this happens.

Kusras, the latest version on Asset Store (as well as evaluation one) got all the features you missing, except texture outputs and 4-channel maps: internally MapMagic uses not the textures, but 16-bit 1-channel map. I was not aiming to make a procedural texture generator like Substance Designer. MapMagic works with height and individual splat layers. Since this information has nothing in common with color - why it should be united in 4-channel blocks - not 2 or 5?

Almost everything from the wish list could be made with Texture Input, Constant, Blend generators, the only thing - they use 1-channel maps instead of 4-channel.

- texture input is done with a Texture Input generator.
- constant color generators could be replaced with a Constant Generator (or several Constant Generators)
- multiply, mix are done with a Blend Generator
- select a color (value) range to use in a mask could be done with a Curve Generator
- map preview is done by right-clicking on an output circle (not generator, but a blue circle at the right of it) and selecting Preview - In Window
- adding, subtracting and mixing maps is done with a Blend Generator
- and inverting could be done with a Curve as well.

 

Ah okay, sorry for some things i did not found as i was looking it under different name. But to explain more about textures. I do not mean any complex textures, just something as have world machine. I would like to mix 1-4 height maps into colored texture, where each input of height is transfered into one color channel (there we have 4 channels RGBA so up to 4 inputs) It should be something like foreach pixel in texture is something like new color(inputA,InputB,InputC,InputD) where inputs are values on the same pixel of inputed channel maps. Then allow the result to export as texture(png/tiff). Why it should be done? Some shaders (procedural grass, non-basic terrains) uses 4 channel textures instead of array of 16 bit one color textures to determine where to apply any effect connected to referenced channel (mostly ground textures). So I cannot use your direct textures output because i need to send data into material and in different data-type otherwise it does nothing.

Other use of terrain based textures are colormaps -
Colormaps make each part of map exlusive and add more realism, itis used by e.g. ats colormap shader, or it is common for cry engine. There is for example colormaped terrain:
http://forum.unity3d.com/attachments/fully_normalmapped-jpg.37165/

This could be done also in photoshop, but there is no option to export your height maps as a texture (no textures into terrain) but write output on disk. This also could be usefull, if someone want to modify results for example in mudbox or to store it out of unity. All things I can implement myself, but don't want, because there are problems with updating your asset afterwards.

There is video about splatmaps in world machine (know your asset is always compared to this program, but why not to take some inspiration from this to fully replace it for unity )

In the image i add the inputs needed for my ats colormap. I modified it to use colormap as an distance map to see this texture instead of tilling terrain texture.

 

@D3m0nProwl3r I'm looking at trying to integrate RTP for the infinite terrain as well, hopefully you check back and we can swap notes on this thread. It seems a lot of issues are sorted out here!

@Wright We purchased MM about a week ago and we are very impressed! The main thing that brought us on board was your forum support. I can't tell you how many days I've personally lost on assets that I felt were amazing at first but then they had very steep learning curves due to no support or quality manuals. We think your presence and level of attention you give to your products is great.

On a side-note, I know you've mentioned in the past that you will one day integrate support for Voxeland and if it's supported like MM, I know I would be happy repurchasing it!

Keep up the work, this asset has been an amazing time saver for us!

 

Ok I will also simplify it all i need is just integrate mm into ats colormap ultra but as i said there is a need of colorized splatmaps and colormap overlay...

 

Kusras, I've got your point. The main thing that you need is an output to the texture. I'll think about implementing it, right now I can't clearly see how it should work with the infinite terrain - should it create a bunch of textures with names like "Terrain 0,1" in a special folder or should the textures be stored in scene - but in the last case, how could they be used by other plugins?.. Definitely there are things to ponder.

Thanks! I'm doing best to keep everyone happy, but it is nice to hear that I'm doing a good job!

 

Well I do not know how infinite terrain works, if it is generated runtime there is safest version to put textures directly into shader you can set texture by string name like material.shader.setTexture("splat1",value); this means that you need string and material inputs. But it is not much user friendly... also i had problems with ats and tiled terrain, but I did not tried it too long. Probably only problem was that you need to use for each tiled terrain a new material and then you would need to set all the properties again. So it would be quite tricky, much work and maybe not working at all.

But if you know size of terrain there is no problem to save outputs as you said. And let user apply it (if this is not absolutely common). For infinite terrain you have to index it somehow, so always there is a logic for exporting it under its index and let user to solve it(personaly think rtp or ats are not much suitable for infinite terrains, and if user wants he has saved textures and can try to write application out of your asset). If there will be problems you can just block it for infinite terrains.