Voxeland - Voxel Terrain Tool

I guess it's worth trying to blur the grass layer - just a little bit, 1-2 iterations and amount 0.333 - to remove those protruding blocks

 

Thanks!

 

@Jeremy-Borton
Update: I'm testing out "Unity FBX Exporter" so far it does export everything possible to export and keeps the position of chunks and other meshes etc however - I did get errors on the texture output of Voxeland but the author is looking into it (believes the error is in his code) and hopefully soon it will get the textures from the Voxeland shader. I'm hoping that it will get the textures from the Megasplat integration as well but will have to test this later when @Wright is able & ready to release the update.

 

You wouldn't believe it, but I just bought the Unity FBX Exporter as well and have been testing it out tonight before you just said that...lol
I found Megasplat can save the meshes, but only one at a time, and it's way to slow for all 100 that I have in voxeland...
So yeah, the Unity FBX Exporter works very well! The only thing is, it'd be nice if I could save the texture data, or splat data or whatever is painted on it. I also found out that Megasplat's script that it places on Voxeland Chunks when trying to paint on them...kinda messes things up. Haven't been able to use a splat painter on voxeland yet. I also had to update to Unity 5.6.2 just to use megasplat.

Let me know when you can get texture data as well from voxeland...It didn't quite work yet for me, as you said.
I also would very much like to know how to integrate megasplat with voxeland so that it works...if only there was a little video of integrating it.

 

Voxeland doesn't have Voxeland support at all yet, this is a request I've been asking about since Megasplat was released but thankfully Denis has announced that he is now focusing on the integration and has been working hard at it for a while now.

 

@Wright
Will you be updating the documentation at any point? I noticed that both the Map Magic and Voxeland documentation no longer match the current versions and there is very little other than a single video to demonstrate what you can do with the MapMagic/Voxeland integration. As much fun as trial and error is I would appreciate some documentation updates as I delve back into modifying the Voxeland code.

 

@Wright
Why when i add Voxeland 5.0.1 to MapMagic 1.8.2 i will get 210 error . how i fix it .


Thanks

 

@Wright

I PM'd you 3 times in the last month... Has your inbox evaporated or something?

 

Shockwolf, sorry, but I hardly ever check the new messages. In case you want to contact me please use my official publisher's email.

Supgarn, are you using MM or Voxeland beta version from GitLab?

EvansSoftware, I plan to focus on documentation right after MM release 1.8.3, it will happen in next couple of days. I'll start with the MM wiki page, and Voxeland wiki will follow.

I don't really know the better way Voxeland can support Voxeland than it already does
Right, MegaSplat integration is in my to-do queue, but I don't know ETA though.

Jeremy-Borton, thanks for testing Voxeland with FBX Exporter!
I'm afraid that native Voxeland texture channels format is rather complicated and could be used only with Voxeland shaders, BUT you can switch it to the standard color channels (r for channel 1, g for ch2 etc) by enabling "Color Channels (RTP Mode)" in Settings.

 

Ha! you got me there. I must have posted that before being fully awake. I meant that Voxeland doesn't have Megasplat support yet

 

Has anyone managed to successfully set up a means of Saving and Loading in game changes to the Voxeland terrain?
And if so how did you go about it and could you provide some example code, please?

Thanks in advance.

Fair enough and thanx Wright!

 

Use the FromByteArray and ToByteArray functions on the Data object to get the data to save/load. After loading clear the chunks to force the re-build.

 

First, I'm new to MapMagic and Voxeland 5. I created a world using MapMagic from the youtube tutorial. I would like to add a Voxeland terrain to this world. I looked at the video on how to combine MapMagic and Voxeland but it does not explain how to use VL inside MM. Any direction would be helpful. Thanks!

 

Create voxeland terrain and add voxeland output node to the mapmagick graph.
What exactly do you meen when "how to use VL inside MM", cuz the workflow pretty similar.

 

Here is an article about Voxeland serialization. Yep, it has code examples.
Just duplicating email answer here in case someone else will find it useful.

Nitrox32, It works in a bit different way: you don't substitute the standard terrain with Voxeland in the MapMagic scene, but use MapMagic to generate land for Voxeland. So first of all you have to create Voxeland terrain, and then set up it's generator using MapMagic graph - you do not need to create MapMagic object or add MapMagic component at all.

Keep in mind that since Voxeland is a 3-dimensional voxel terrain it requires the other generate approach rather than standard heightmap terrains. It uses it's own Voxeland Output (not Height and Texture Outputs). In most cases this means that your MapMagic graph that works fine with the standard terrains will not work with Voxeland without some deep changes. I really recommend you creating a new Voxeland-focused graph instead using Voxeland as a terrain engine.

 

This is why we need the updated documentation. I had the same issue of trying to figure out what parts of MM from the tutorials were still relevant. Initially I thought I could just change where MM created the output layers with Voxeland output but it looked truly bizarre. I am guessing features like the Shore generator don't work with Voxeland but there is no documentation stating that. To prevent objects appearing in water I ended up modifying the code to add min and max heights for the Voxeland objects, no idea if there is a way to do it without coding. Currently we only have the one simple video of using MM and Voxeland which is based around creating caves, what would be good is a similar tutorial to that produced for MM (Island tutorial for example) but using Voxeland outputs.

 

Two questions:
How large a single terrain can be (with reasonable performance and serialization time on modern PC). Is 2000x2000 meters ok?
How well does it perform with custom shaders, for example DX11 Low Poly shader from Asset Store?

 

Hi every buddy,

@Wright I just discovered Voxeland and I like the trailer a lot.
Can you please make some in depth video tutorials on how to use the plugin? Can Voxeland be used by Players to change/modify Terrain ingame at runtime and does it come with a solution for that? Since I am still not an expert in Unity I am relying a lot on easy Integrations provided with the Assets from the store. Does Voxeland have easy Integrations for Third Person Controllers (Opsive, Invector, Ootis...) ? Can it work along with Assets like EBS: Easy Build System and does it give us an easy to setup Save/Load System like the one included in EBS (save to external file) ?

Thanks a lot.

 

How is the Megasplat support going on?

 

kulesz, if you switch your terrain mode (both editor and playmode) to dynamic mode you can have a terrain that big. However, the whole terrain will not be displayed, it will build as the camera comes closer to the new chunks. If you are using auto-generator for your terrain and do not plan to sculpt everything by hand I'd like to recommend you using "dynamic infinite" mode. In this case you can have a much bigger terrain (not actually infinite, but extremely big). It will not only create terrain meshes when you approach them, but will generate the whole terrain from scratch, not keeping the terrain voxel data in memory.

I didn't look into Low Poly shader, but I doubt that it will work out of the box. Voxeland meshes require some specific vertex information like colors (or alternatively uv1-4) to blend textures and apply ambient, I doubt that shader can handle it.

Weblox, Voxeland terrain could be changed in playmode.

I have not tested Voxeland with all of the third person controllers, but I guess there should not an issue with them since Voxeland internally use the standard mesh colliders. Can't say the same about EBS, actually don't have clue if it will work. I can provide you with a Voxeland copy so you can test if it's compatible with the assets you use (email me for that).

RandAlThor, after I'll submit new MapMagic version in a couple of days I'm going to update all of the documentation (both MM and Voxeland) I plan to return to MegaSplat integration to my products. Unfortunately, don't have ETA yet.

 

@Wright
Awesome! PM/Email is out.
Thanks a lot for your great support!

 

@Wright Would it be possible to have a 2k by 2k terrain that is not dynamic? I need it fully loaded for servers to have the collider. Clients are fine having it clipped to camera. Because its a server though, I don't really care about the graphics side of it or the resolution, as long as the collider is accurate. Could that be something achievable in Voxeland?

 

Theoretically there's nothing prevents you from creating 2K*2K (it will be 2010 with the default chunk size) Voxeland terrain except the performance and build time.

Just tried creating a static terrain so big, it took more than 3 minutes to generate it on 3 cores, 4500 batches and 60 millions tris. It's definitely better use dynamic terrain for clients in this case, but at least it's possible.

 

Hmm that wouldn't be acceptable performance for us, so unfortunately we'll have to pass. It seems voxel based terrain just might not be something we can accomplish for our multiplayer needs.

 

I just mean that you could use static terrain on the server side only, where batches and other graphics stuff are not a problem (you can have no camera to avoid rendering anything). As well as generate time - the server has to generate the terrain only once after being turned on.

At the client side it's better use dynamic terrain that builds new chunks when player comes to them. There will be no graphic overload more than in demo scene. Voxeland will build exactly the same terrain as in static mode, with the only difference it will not be build at once.

 

I understand, but we allow self host servers, and adding 3 minutes additional load time isn't something we want.

 

For the server, is it possible to specify the areas that will be loaded? And not have it based on camera position, since it will be multiple areas and in different locations. Basically thinking if I could have it mostly around the location of players, then perhaps I can work around not having a static terrain on the server.

I would have to be able to add/remove those locations at runtime though as players connect/disconnect.

 

You can generate the terrain around any objects with some particular tag (just enable it in settings). You can tag characters, this will make the the terrain created around them automatically.

 

Hi @Wright ,

thanks a lot for the chance to try out Voxeland in my current Project. Here is some feedback about first impression.

Spoiler: First Feedback

From the first look at the demo Scene I have been really impressed. The terrain and Nature is really beautiful, especially ground and rocks are very natural.

On opening the Demo Scene I do get an error message . It can be cleared, but will return on when opening the Scene again
.

Spoiler: Red Error on opening Demo Scene

ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null.
Parameter name: key
System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[UnityEngine.Transform,System.Collections.Generic.List`1[Voxeland5.ObjectPool+Instance]].Add (UnityEngine.Transform key, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 value) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Collections.Generic/Dictionary.cs:391)
Voxeland5.ObjectPool.OnAfterDeserialize () (at Assets/Voxeland/Main/ObjectPool.cs:339)

Edit in Playmode is working fine except adding grass (with "Edit In Playmode" ticked on.)

Spoiler: Edit in Playmode - Grass Block

When selecting the grass tool with numberkey, remove grass is working as expected, but adding grass at playtime only works if the grass block is selected in Inspector window (on Voxeland GO)

Note: adding Object Blocks and Light Blocks does only seem to work with "Edit In Playmode" ticked on in Settings - changing Land Blocks at playtime does also work when this Option is turned off.

Using Voxeland with Third Person Controllers does work as expected but needs some Optimation to make its usage really comfortable. Mainly it needs a robust GUI - Toolbox to control the Voxeland blocks and brushes.

Spoiler: GUI Toolbox

GUI Tool-Panel :

• select Brush size

• select Tool (add/dig/remove/smooth/remove fragments)

• select Object/Land Block (scrollable/with Categories - automagically added to GUI

• Option to show/hide mouse Pointer when open/close GUIToolbox

• Enable Voxeland Brush with GUIToolbox / Disable through rest of the Gameplay.

To make full use of Unitys Event System, that you have integrated in the Demo UI, it would be nice to have

• Options to access Save/Load/ClearSavedSlot Functions through Unity.Event System

• Options to access more Voxeland Functions through Unity.Event System

Spoiler: EBS Easy Build System

It seems Voxeland does not work "out of box" with the EBS System, as the EBS Terrain Manager Component does not recognize the Voxeland GO as Terrain.

• The Author of EBS is currently working on Version 3.0 and after quickly talking back to him on the Forum, he has put Voxeland Integration on the List for V 3.0.

Maybe you can share some tipps and tricks for a stable ("out of the box") Integration ?

I have put Voxeland on my Wishlist for sure and I am hoping you can help with Integrating in Third Person Controllers and EBS Easy Build System.

Thanks for all your support and keep up the good work.

 

It's nice to hear you've liked Voxeland (at least enough to add it to your wishlist).

I'd like to clarify some things about your feedback if you don't mind:

Are you using pre 5.4.5 Unity version?

I admit there could be a confusion in demo scene - the grass is added with Alt pressed, and it's added to the top level only (it could not be added to caves). So it might seem that the grass is not adding in some cases. And yes, grass should be selected in Voxeland object to be added - but it's common for all other blocks.

I have not tried EBS yet, and I've got assets I've already promised to integrate first like MegaSplat. So I unfortunately I don't know when I can look into it. But, of course, I will provide EBS author a Voxeland voucher if he wants to.

 

Hi @Wright ,

I really do. The beautiful terrain it delivers is worth a further look itself, while the great features really get me excited about it. With my limited budget I might have to wait for a Unity sale.

I did run Voxeland on Unity 5.5.1f1 and can test again on Unity 5.6.1f1.

I will try and run a test again. I have discovered Placement with Alt pressed , but havent noticed the "inside cave" limitation.

This is where it gets confusing. I totally understand that workflow when using Voxeland at Designtime. The Designer selects Voxeland GO in the Hierarchy then selects the Grass block in the Inspector window and the grass will be correctly added.

However , when using Voxeland at Playtime (Runtime) to be modified by my Players they are not able to select the Voxeland GO or the Grass Block in the Inspector.

They should use the numberkeys instead to the select the Grass/Land/Object/Light Blocks or the GUI Toolbox . The GUI does not work in the Demo but numbers do - except the grass block.

Again this is beyond generous and I will talk back to the Author to let him know about your offer. I really hope he will take the opportunity and get in touch with you soon

 

I'd like to overlay a heightmap across the entire terrain to imprint/stamp trails - is this currently possible? Maybe a heightmap draw tool tool could be created like splat map creation works.. draw out the height map and use different drawing brushes. This would be cool if megasplat could be used to tap into this and maybe it's just a change of a few lines of code -that way at least all your painting/texturing tools are already available.

 

Do you mean some sort of mask that is applied over all of the terrain that multiplies brush value?

 

Sort of.. How about in addition to importing a heightmap image, the grey scale image be used/written to as a splat map that becomes a dynamic mask - a mask that can be both imported and edited/painted further or created from scratch just by painting areas either on the terrain or a 2d window of the image mask.

I think this method might have to be connected to a generator with an opacity field rather than a brush.

This would likely work well with the Cave creation method but in this case the ability to paint and or assign the greyscale image to the noise filter to get/create specific patterns that would be come walking paths and wide open spaces. Perhaps if the noise filter could connect to one of the ideal channels in megasplat to paint a heightmap then this would be pretty awesome.. by default megasplat wouldn't use/create a global heightmap for meshes other than effecting the height information for displacement textures I believe @jbooth but maybe Jason may have something, a channel that could work? So this image for example to be applied through the noise filter to give a specific shape imprinted along the terrain surface but additionally to paint more paths to the 2d heightmap or paint this path on the terrain and no matter what other kind of terrain added such as biomes will automatically inherit the path of the Dynamic Heightmap. Sorry for the repetition - just trying to be clear as I can.

 

Hi Denis,

i bought MapMagic and Voxeland some days ago (awesome tools ).
But at the moment i'm stuck on your tutorial

.
I can't get the result as you (see image below).

I tried with Unity 5.6.3 and 2017.1 (both x64). Also tried different generators (legacy noise, blend and so on).

Can you or someone else explain this? Did i miss something?



Thanks
Coolzero

 

In that screenshot you haven't finished the tutorial yet. There are a lot of missing nodes still. I recommend reading the MapMagic wiki as well which has been getting some updates recently. That will help you understand what all the nodes do better.

 

I've been playing with Map Magic and Voxeland today, and I gotta say it's really cool! I really love Map Magic and the ability to quickly iterate on generating terrains, and Voxeland is super cool because I'm looking to generate caves and overhangs.

I can't get exactly what I'm after though, and that's some really smooth terrains. I've searched through this forum and tried everything (bluring the map, increasing the smoothing, etc) but can't get some smooth hills or even flat slopes. Generating a gradient gives a stepped look, and while it's cool, it's not quite what I'm after unfortunately.

I can understand if it's outside the scope of Voxeland, but I don't suppose generating meshes based on Dual Contouring (or Manifold Dual Contouring) is on the road map, is it? If not, do you think it would be difficult to somehow shoe-horn my own mesh generation system, or grab the output data from Map Magic and run it through a different generation system? Or any tips in general? Perhaps if that's the case, the Map Magic forum thread would be a better place for me to ask about that..

 

I've also been experimenting with MapMagic and Voxeland and have found the same results. I think a really smooth terrain is a great idea and a necessity as well but it seems hard if not impossible to achieve. I found that the tips in the past few pages of this thread has helped a little bit but it still doesn't seem quite perfect so maybe it's just not currently possible to have a flat or smooth slope or hill. They still have a sort of stepped or terrace look to them which is not always ideal when trying to create realistic looking terrain.

If you look over the at least the last few pages of this thread you'll see that clearly this is something people want and require which presently seems difficult to achieve. Therefore I suspect that it will in fact have to be something added to the roadmap since people will just keep requesting it. Otherwise hopefully someone can find a solution that works satisfactorily for everyone.

Until then I don't know what the solution is but perhaps it would be as simple as not limiting the Voxeland parameters for the smooth and relax settings and whatnot since they have a max value limit set for some reason. I'm not sure why they are limited but maybe for performance reasons or maybe it's something to do with math which isn't my strong point. Time for more experimenting I suppose.

 

@MakeGames2

Yep, I read over just about the entire thread looking for little tips, there were a few that improved the smoothness, but nothing that was quite acceptable enough for me

I haven't dug too much into the Voxeland code, just a brief peek, but I think this might be outside of the scope of Voxeland, unfortunately but understandably. It seems like the meshing algorithm used has some hard requirements, that results in a minecraft-like boxel look, and then just running a smooth over the mesh (like if you were to smooth a mesh in Maya). This is fine and works great for a lot of cases and makes it easy to modify the terrain.

On the flip side, it doesn't seem like DC is something you could just swap into Voxeland. Nor a great fit for doing realtime modifications of the terrain because it's not strictly cube-based compared to something like MC or a smoothed boxel setup like Voxeland does. DC can generate some oddly shaped non-manifold geometry, which doesn't lend itself super well for realtime modifications. 100% doable, though.

In my usecase I don't need to be able to modify the terrain after the generation step, so it makes it easy for me to consider DC for the smoother looking meshes, as the downsides are not applicable to me.

That being said I think I'll have to look into writing my own implementation of DC separate from Voxeland, hopefully I can find a way to use Map Magic in conjunction with a custom DC generator.

 

Yes, but the result in the video (6m 8s or so) are completely different than what i got with the same settings.

 

Hi there, I'm getting an issue with some chunks either not being lit or textured correctly (they appear darker). Editing the terrain near or in the effected chunk will fix it but then another nearby chunk will then be affected. Is this a known bug?

 

Hi,

I am using Voxeland with MapMagic, and I have tiling issue between chunks.
Do you know where it come from ?
My textures are tilable and I am using RTP polybrush shader, if it matters.

http://imgur.com/a/zcZQ4

 

I was playing around with voxeland and try to make little planets. in combination with the Space Graphics Toolkit i made this:







Problems I have encountered:
The Horzont Mesh is only able to work straight on the Y axis.
The creation of a globe I do with the Volume Brush. This is not optimal.
It is also not done with MapMagic. With Map Magic it could look like a cool planet, but the question is whether the performance allows at all.
I think if the horizontal mesh would work as a ball, one could certainly represent very large planets, which consist of the wide only of the horizontal mesh.
Of course, the horizontal mesh is no longer a good name in the case.

 

You can smooth the terrain by increasing the number of relax iterations - this will make your terrain almost smooth, so it will be hard to recognize the block data - it's up to you do decide whether it's good or bad.

Standard smoothing (2 relax iterations):


10 Relax iterations:


Note that if the iterations count is more than 2 you have to increase the Chunk Margins value to prevent seams between chunks.

Yep, tried to reproduce the whole tutorial from scratch and got the same result as you guys - either the video is not correct (probably I've missed something) or it's a Voxeland new bug, I will find it out.

Ascensi, if you don't mind could you please add a proposal at the issues page? This way this idea will not get lost. I can't promise implementing it in near future, but I can do it when I'll have time.

I guess the shader is applying textures in object space instead of world space. It's ok when you have a single object, but not in this case. Try changing the tile size (I don't remember exactly how it's done in RTP) so that the texture repeats itself non-fractional number of times.

Coltenney, it's not a known bug, could you please report it here and attach a screenshot or a video of what's happening with the lighting it it's possible?

Diego_Graphics, OMG! Hey, wait a minute - is this Voxeland?!

 

@Wright
Yes it is voxeland. They are somewhat too small for planet defensively. Artefacts occur on the surfaces. And they are not detailed. Compared to the planets of Kerbal Space program, they are quite small, but have the advantage that they are voxel based. I think if you trick something with the horizontal mesh and this allows to function as a ball would certainly be a planet mode possible, the map streaming of Voxeland is already very good. I would be glad about an expectation that allows to generate planets. It is also an absolutely missing function in unity. I think it could make map magic & voxeland even better.

Planets over map magic prodecual would be a dream

[Here should be a screenshot.. but the internet provider is working on the cables in our garden, i'll upload it later]
Here you can see the "artefacts".
If we had islands, mountains and continents here would certainly not be noticed.


But because the horizont mesh isn't working here as spherical system it goes hard on the performance when it get bigger.
Another problem with the horizontal mesh is that it also does not work in gigantic caves, because it is always only visible on the surface.

 

I really like your extension and updated to the most recent version last week and must say that I really love the performance improvements!

However, I stumbled upon quite a problem for myself. What would be a good way to get an array of all the block types that were removed by a brush? I require something like GetBlock(x,y,z) but for the brush and seriously cannot wrap my head around how to solve this.

 

Diego_Graphics, it's awesome! I did not ever expect Voxeland could look this way! I'm curious how you did that, what was the Voxeland size, were you using Curved World or something. It would be great if you could make a tutorial on how to create planets with Voxeland.

And feel free to post more images, they are super cool!

I have a plans to generate planet-tiled terrains with MapMagic, but they will be the flat terrains, just repeating themselves endlessly. At least in the beginning - maybe I'll find the way to use this tile system with Voxeland.

Tagaris, thanks! I can't imagine the way to get block types out of brush - at least without changing the code. With code change you can modify Brush.Process method to add your algorithms in dig case for all modes. But I think it will be better get all the blocks at brush position before actually applying the brush and after and get the difference.

 

This might not be the place to post this but I'm going to ask anyway. I just finished the tutorial video using map magic. I would like to add voxeland to that map. The first question: is can I do this and dig into a map magic terrain to create caves that same way I would as if I were using voxeland by itself? If so, can someone explain in detail (with pictures is possible) how to do this. Sorry if the answer is obvious, I'm new to both of these assets and I'm a bit overwhelmed. Thanks!

 

I asked @Wright the very same question, I wanted to convert the Island demo to Voxeland, unfortunately his response was that it was not possible. Currently there is no documentation that I know of which describes what aspects of MapMagic/Voxeland integration works and what does not, however I believe this is currently being worked on. A better demo/video of using MapMagic with Voxeland than the cave creation one would also be great. I ended up modifying the VoxelandGenerator code in MapMagic to get a bit more functionality but I would rather not keep having to change the code if there are ways to achieve the same effect as is.

 

Hello!

I've purchased Voxeland and Ultimate Survival so I can create a game for me and my kid to enjoy, but I've hit a wall.

I'm trying to have the two integrated together but my dyslexia is really preventing me from doing it without a crazy amount of frustration. I'm extremely new to game development, and I would love some help if at all possible

What I want to do:

Make a Shovel, Pick, & Axe that can terraform (Raise and lower) the terrain in small increments.
I was following this video:

But I can't keep up, I've watched it a good couple times now and my brain just isn't helping me get through this.
Can anyone help me with this? I'd be willing to compensate for your time, I'd love to get started on the part of the development I'm looking forward to the most; Using Ultimate Survival to implement anything my son can come up with haha. I know I have a long way to go, but I'm excited.