--PolyWorld-- Low Poly Toolkits and More!

Good catch. I'll fix that



Thinking about adding the rock spires. Thoughts?

 

Totally. Utterly Rock. Also give nice dramatic counterpoint and architectural structure.
The repeated shape used to frame space in your example is particularly effective.

No brainer.

 

Looks wonderful! Been having so much fun using Polyworld so far. I don't want to say anything to influence QT - That would be like a monkey telling da Vinci how to paint.

 

I have officially worn out my "Visit Forum" button checking this thread for updates hah.

Was thinking of a simple script to a) populate the trees (and such) dynamically at runtime. to parent mesh chunks.
and to b) switch between swatches of mesh as the player walks to provide an infinite playground.

I have them working now with basic flat meshes, populating trees at runtime, switching the surrounding.
not much code, probably 50 lines I guess.

I did however have a question, Can we choose the TAG, or LAYER of the resulting meshes "Ahead of time".
That would make the Start() searching a little bit tidier.

Also, I struggled to solve the very basic problem of moving meshes, I will just make a quick note here as this is probably relevant to likely use cases for your meshes.

Spoiler

In the end I used 2 lists, containing all the "9 item" tiles, then sorted them into 4 small 3 tile lists. (N, S, E, W) based on their positional data. and attached triggers. Then added the logic to shift the contents of the opposite list to be exactly located on the other side of the list item that activates. That sounds complicated but isn't.


How do we handle corners? just iterate over both lists!

Trigger: Am I in North list? Yes I am, Move South list 3* Terrain Breadth North.

Trigger: (I can't be in the South list)

Trigger: Am I in East list? Yes I am (I must be a corner!) Move West list 3* Terrain Stride East.

Trigger: (I can't be in the West list) Mr Boolean says so.

RecalculateGrid();
repeat OnTrigger.

Happy to share the code for that, and the tree/object population (it's basic raycast stuff) when this pack is live for me to test this on.

thanks. Exciting!

 

Started on the demo scene yesterday and decided to trash it as it wasn't really selling what I want to sell. Not that I'm a perfectionist, but I do have to have a vision for what I'm working on. This version was just me feeling through it so there wasn't much sense, let alone composition, that spoke to me. Here is a shot of just a corner.

 

Just splurged on fantasy treasure loot kit, given your advice, nice stuff in there.
Really aching to try out this pack. wow.

Re pic: your worst composition is better than most. You're just that good

The kids here will really enjoy the immersion of your design. Engaging.
Take our money, before I spend it on more fake gems!

 

Gah, Budget has literally just got enough left in it to buy this pack. must-not-spend-it...

EDIT: Doh. spent some. Ah well, next week.

 

Hi, I'm very new at Unity. For an art installation I'm looking to build a file that'll allow an infinite fly through of a landscape. Kind of like booting up minecraft and just walking in one direction while the world keeps generating.

I'd like to do this in a low poly flat shaded style. Would Unity + this kit allow me to do that?

 

"Fly" is a very open term. Exactly "in one direction" with no user input? at a fixed height?

Roughly speaking this is in fact the same problem as http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/polyworld-for-unity.239365/page-9#post-1867893 (open the spoiler)

I figured someone would want this, answer is "Yes", but the pack itself does not give you this. It brings the poly-mesh goodness to the party.

You have to add the "I went past here, so shove that other block there" logic, I would have to say - with limited/No user interaction - that would be VERY easy."Am I 256 pixels further in the Z direction? Yes, Then I had better spawn/move that next chunk of landscape". Basic.

ASIDE: Also might want to consider "Pooling" if your installation is going to be doing this all day.

HEIGHT: Also I have made all of my worlds be no higher than about 10 units in vertical variation. Being up "in the air" gives you an enormous amount of stuff the render all at once. So think about your camera angles, topology, and interaction of the end user wisely.

LOD/HEIGHTMAPS: It is also just worth briefly considering the distance to the things you want to see (LOD may be pointless/required ) and to understand http://qt-ent.com/PolyWorld-Woodland/unity-terrain-in-depth/ where the data is stored and how the heightmap resolution may affect your final outputs conversion.

Well, hope it helps. enjoy.

 

Hey Bobs,

Yeah I pretty much mean flying in a straight line forwards at either a fixed height or a fixed height above the terrain (to avoid flying through mountains). Possibly I'll add a physical button on a socket that'll allow viewers to stop the flight while they're holding the button down to appreciate a single view for a while.

Essentially it'll keep infinitely flying across a landscape. I want to generate the landscape to avoid repetition. Especially since I want to fly through a variety of scapes like desert, forest, urban and so on.

My thoughts are pretty similar to yours. It seems sensible to work with "tiles" that run up to the visible horizon. As soon as a tile is completely behind the camera I'll recycle it by placing it beyond the next visible tile and replacing the objects on the tile. I suppose the tricky part is making it seamlessly connect to it's preceding tile, especially when transitioning from one landscape type to the next.

Height is a tricky one. I'd love to have a patch of blue sky visible to do some stuff with clouds and such. But by the time you're angled low enough to see the sky, you're also seeing an awful long way into the distance.

Can polyworld generate low poly landscapes on the fly? Judging from the Unity documentation I can generate chunks of terrain dynamically, can the polyworld script process those in time to slot them into my "railway" of terrain tiles?

If not, maybe I can look into something like generating some 50 odd tiles of terrain that get rotated and recolored to pull extra duty. If the number of base elements is large enough, I should be able to fake random looking terrain.

 

Yeah, as far as I know to do realtime you would want a shader. They are out there.

However I am doing what you suggest, basically putting together random tiles with known edge heights. and then looping them randomly.

I have mocked you something up. let me post it. one sec
http://kaycare.co.uk/games/fantasy/
This has intentionally terrible shadowing to show you the edges... just one tile repeated 3x3
Those are 256m tiles, the camera height is 20m, at this height you can see the tile appearing in the distance, I would probably go with a 5 or 6 x 3 for your thing. possibly more. To get maximum beauty.

EDIT: Looking at that demo I would cheat, and use hi res tiny props, fly lower to the ground, fire out a ray in front and smoothly steer around hills in my path (would look nicer), maybe adjust the height slowly over time on a sine. that kind of thing. looks doable.

With the polyworld props would look great I think.

Sorry about the size, accidentally used a 4096 texture somewhere - trying to find it... (20Mb)
EDIT: Meh, it's my texture atlas, have to live with it for now. (20mb for that one tree hahahaha)
EDIT EDIT: Tree now textureless Added shadows for fun.

Spoiler

Basically that flies in one direction - and hits triggers - you could just use the Z position and forget the triggers. The advantage of this system is the user can travel in any direction forever....

It works like this:



and here is the entire - vast - code for that (rigidbody Kinematic ON, Gravity OFF)

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3. using System.Collections;
4.  
5. public class FlyForever : MonoBehaviour {
6.  
7. Rigidbody rigid;  // thing to move
8. float factor; // how fast
9.  
10. // Use this for initialization
11. void Start () {
12. rigid = gameObject.GetComponent<Rigidbody>();
13. factor = 0.1f; // throttle it back
14. }
15.  
16. // This is the physics loop, do it here
17. void FixedUpdate() {
18. rigidbody.MovePosition( gameObject.transform.position + ( Vector3.forward * factor));
19. }
20.  
21. }
22.  

But honestly, I was being lazy, you wouldn't bother with physics and just glide it along without it.
That will appear a bit jerky as is I think.

But shows how simple it is.

The trigger code is also trivial and I am happy to share it, just waiting on the mighty QT to release this next pack.

Sorry for hijacking the thread again.

 

Working on the approach up the mountains. Not immediately obvious where the path lies. Some small adjustments needed

 

This might seem like an odd request considering the primary thrust of this asset...

...but would it be possible to make the requirement of materials/uv's/maps optional?

I purchased Polyworld with the aim to use the vertex splitting functionality on Skinned Meshes, and it kept erroring me out (as expected) because I was working with vertex colored objects to begin with, and they don't have texture maps.

I prefer to control my vertex coloring in my 3D editing software when necessary, so being able to then keep what I have going while getting my verts split would be a huge boon.

Doable?

Thanks!!

-Steven

EDIT: To be clear, a simple function to Split Vertices? that just does that, with no checks to the material state of the GO.

 

Check PM.

 

@QT, what did you use for the fog effects in the screenshot at the top of this page (pg 9)? You have a nice yellow-golden looking distance-based fog visible on the spires as they recede toward the horizon, but you also seem to have a sort of grayish ground fog effect lower toward the ground.

 

The yellowish fog is unity's standard fog system. The blueish fog is Unity's "Global Fog" post effect.

 

hmmm.. wonder what's up there?



Tough guy standing guard..

 

That fog effect on the large stones is very inspiring, in fact it gave me ideas for my current demo, i think the less expansive shots lose a bit from the loss of contrast with what i assume to be bloom/fog. All in all I do find this asset great, its a great thing to turn to when wanting ideas, lately even if i dont use it, importing it, converting models and making shaders based on the aesthetic has been very satisfying. Was a good purchase, cheers!

 

Who needs porn.. when you got this xD

Although, I would imagine rendering all those triangles would kill low end computers. I think SCTOR would come into play with poly world stuff very nicely.

Also, did you notice, that when it bakes the colors, it also bakes the anything above the map? ie: clouds and GUI's lol.

It baked my minimap and my actionbar onto my map xD

And fast 3 min video on your methods to make the assets in 3ds would be totally awesome. I made some grass to paint all over with QuickBrush... but it's no where near as cool as what you do. I unwrapped the texture and did it in illustrator... and let me tell you... making poly textures takes a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time. Even with grid snapping on.

 

When occlusion culling and LODs are active in this scene, it's maybe 100-200k triangles. That's not all that bad. What will kill lower-end computers is the number of per-pixel operations. What's great about the art style, and the shaders, is that it looks just as good running through the cheap vertex-lit rendering path, but there is a great speed increase.

The bake method I have to do is admittedly ghetto. I send an email to Unity to request exposing the terrain base map. If it's rendering gui stuff, that's definitely not intended. I should disable the gui component in the camera while rendering.

Most of the time spent is modeling. Coloring these assets takes no time at all with a technique I use. I can color that grass to final in less than a minute. Though I would have to think long and hard before telling my secrets to the world as I would still like to try to make a living in the Asset Store If there is enough demand, I'll figure something out.

 

You can trust me with your secrets. I probably wouldn't know how to use them anyway. :/

So when can I send you some money for this Far East asset? Christmas is coming up soon and I don't want anyone here thinking I'm going to spend what I have left on dumb presents . . . or food. Yeah, I want it that bad.

 

Yeah I know where you are coming from there

How about.... like with ProBuilder... but you make... ProPolyBuilder

And to let you know, me and forge3d were bragging about you xD I am converting nearly ALL of his stuff for screenshots so he can use them.

Also, I did a little trick to get 2D ploly grass to work with unity's terrain engine. I copied the main terrain, and pushed it down 0.5 on the Y. Terrain was hidden, but the grass was still showing. NOW THAT! is a ghetto way of doing things
It was only for a test, no way would I think about having two terrains like that. I don't intend NASA computers to be playing me game lmao.

I still don't know why I decided to make an mmo... it's a pita.

Have you seen TerrainEngine use polyworld? Its pretty freaking cool.

 

people make MMO's because they have the most fun playing them.

I still think that wavy shader I posted would have been fine for the polyworld grass, but testing it on 5.0 shows a rewrite is required for that to function. perhaps I can find something in the 5.0 pipeline to do the job, will dig.

Great stuff on the pack. Really exciting.

 

I tried it, but you're right about 5.0. I also read somewhere that they were removing vertixlit too???

And I enjoy every sec of playing and testing my mmo... it's just optimizing and remembering how much stuff has to be rendered is what makes me snore lol.

 

I'm probably doing something stupid but when I...

• Make a Unity Terrain
• Set a .raw height map
• Texture said terrain
• Hit the generate button in Polyworld (Triangles / half)
• Click the "use custom shaders" button...

I frequently (but not always) end up with a jet black polyworld mesh rather than one that copied the texture colors. Am I doing something wrong?

 

At first, no. That is normal if your terrain is gray.

If it happens after that, it's cause you forgot to hide the mesh before you baked the terrain textures. Just remember to click Hide Mesh before you bake the colors.

 

Really love this asset, but I'm running into the max vertices thing a lot with a lot of models. When unity 5 comes out and is 64 bit will this problem be solved easily? Or do you have any plans on ways to fix the max vert count error?

 

Thanks, got it.

 

Crap yes I'm sorry. That's a bug/typo. There is a limit but it's not 21k. I'll update the pack at lunch that fixes this.

 

Just open the converter script and up the count. I think it's at 21k, I just maxed it out to what unity's is.

 

PolyWorld 1.73 Uploaded

- Fix for triangle count limit. The limit is now the same as Unity's.

 

Glad about the fix! Thought there was a specific reason for it so didnt change it but it put the lock on using it for my current 'thing', with the correct 60k+ limit it should now work as a very interesting alternative mode that would have the benefit of being able to look great in vertex lit - and therefore available to a much bigger range of computers. Also opens up android/ios as feasible targets. Cheers.

 

Thoughts on the Bamboo? ~100tris a stalk. Will probably make it a little denser and do LODs.

Yea that's a waterwheel and it rotates

 

The bamboo should be denser but yep good work. Is it against the general concept or have you thought of more 'participating media' style substances to model and shade in the same vein. Anything like low laying fog or mist, translucency (that era had wax right?), various fluids? I think a slightly transparent mist effect could be great, especially if you supply some agriculture-based models. Being able to do the surrounding area would be neat.

I just had a fun notion of a faceted sss skin shader, i'd probably happily look into that myself, and the terrainengine insta-polyworld thing looked extremely useful, if it was at all possible to do extremely quickly, voxels would become a blast and being able to deal with any procedural generation or lots of meshes for sequences (like the recent feature coming to megafiers which i'm definitely hoping to have a go with) without offline processing would be handy. So yeah i think of that not just as a feature request but something that would really strengthen the asset maybe.

 

Thanks very good support. 5 Starring this asset.

How easy or hard would it be to make a converter script that can take a whole level of meshes, convert each one at a time, and then replace them in the same position as the original meshes position and then hide the original mesh? I think a lot of people would love this, a way to convert a whole scene of objects to faceted in a 1 button click.

 

I had done that for screenshots of 3D Forge's assets converted in PolyWorld. The Sewer Kit of his has a large demo scene that's constructed from his modular meshes. I batch converted that scene and took the shots.

That was quite awhile ago and I'd have to rewrite the functionality, but it's not too difficult in principle.

 

I know you have mentioned the game view needing to be set correctly for the vertex color baking on the terrains to work properly, but I can't find it anywhere.

For anyone else looking for this information, the game view needs to be set to a square aspect ration (i.e., 800 x 800). This ensures that the terrain fits perfectly into the orthographic camera used to render the image used for baking. If it's not square, the image will include the colored background and the edge of your polyworld terrain will be colored wrong.

 

So I took you at your word and gave this a punt.

Seems like it includes a script to encode the wire data in vertex colors or Tangent which - when the pack comes out - I thoroughly am looking forward to playing with, not least seeing what might happen with some gratuitous color replacement and a relevant shader.

Second nice recommend you gave me. thanks.

When the pack comes out I promise to attempt to make more "on topic" posts, or if you're lucky, no posts at all.

Thanks again.

 

Is there any way I could purchase just the shaders in this package?

 

Been asked before, it's a no.
Given the Herculean effort of the next pack... Worth it to pick up the extra assets.

 

Is the Ancient East pack going to be included with the initial package, or will it be a separate purchase/download?

Here's another picture showing off a basic scene. The mountain range was created in World Machine and then converted with the PolyWorld Terrain conversion tool. What do you guys think? Any suggestions? Obviously the area needs to be filled out quite a bit, but I am very happy with the look.

 

Separate purchase. Looks awesome!!!

 

Okay, that's what I figured. Thanks!

 

I have no doubt the work put into this asset as it is beautiful. But Im not buying 50 dollars worth of assets. When I will only use maybe 2 of the shaders. Sorry it is not worth it if the system is non- used. This is amazing work though.

 

OP here. The shaders are just IBL and vertex colored. Is that what you wanted, or were you expecting more?

 

Working on the background this evening. Note the spires, new clouds, and terraced landscape.



I custom lit the spires and the clouds with large point lights to get those highlights on the edges. I think it worked out pretty well.

 

congrats very nice can't wait to see it in the uas!

hoping Christmas comes early this year!

 

Looking great. I love the waterwheel picture but have to blow it up too much to make it a desktop background.

That's okay though because I made my own PolyWorld mountain background I don't know how I'm going to pull off my 1800s western theme with this Far East pack, but I'm gonna try!

 

With the new ModifyColor script, you should be able to take the meshes in PW:Woodland and change their color to get more in-line with that theme.

 

Will the ModifyColor script be added to the PW:Woodland pack as well?