Voxeland - Voxel Terrain Tool

Good morning! I've got my voxel terrain working nicely in my scene, but I'd like to share a couple of feature requests that I think would help improve Voxeland. (By the way, my terrain looks *fantastic*.)

• Additional Texture Documentation: I'm not clear from the manual or the tutorials how to go about making my own texture arrays to allow custom materials. Perhaps I've overlooked this, or maybe what I read is just not "sinking in" with my specific brain. I'd like to request a little more clarification on how to make custom materials for Voxeland.
• Tool Tips on all UI elements: These are really easy to add.
• "Floating pebble" Filter: Especially when smoothing or digging with the Blob tool, I find that there are cases where tiny bits of material are left floating in the air near the main object. It would be great to have the Rebuild button optionally erase any free-floating objects. (This should be controllable as to size threshold, because some people might want to make that sort of thing on purpose, say for a tiny asteroid where gravity is essentially zero.)
• Deeper Lightmap Support: It would be nice to have more control over generating UV2 channels for lightmapping.
• Integration with World Creator and/or Terrain Composer 2, to allow the outputs from those tools to create a baseline build which could then be sculpted to add the concave geometry.

Thanks for listening! Voxeland is a great tool, and a lot of fun to use!

 

@Wright would it be possible to Generate various terrains styles with Voxeland itself, save the assets then set Voxeland to use those assets as Biomes with Mapmagic?

 

Hi Wright,

Is there a way of running with dynamic limited with a imported height map and getting it to remember deleted chunks as I want to delete the chunks say that appear under water as I am going to run a normal terrain layer as a filler to save on comp resources in a island scene.The terrain size is 600 also.Because when you check it out in play mode it re makes the lost chunks.
How do I set the lowest generate level to 0?

I'm using heightmap generate method with a imported heightmap that I made in the standard terrain editor.
Ideally I only want the chunks above .05 to auto load and save for that matter so mountains in picture get generated but lower areas are deleted.

 

How do you even get that "pinned" area? I am struggling with that.

Also, when I create a section of the map, it does not carry over to the other "generated" portions. I am aware that this is 100% user error on my part, I would just love to know how to fix this.

 

Maybe, in this case. But the name is one for all the purposes: it could be clay, ice, snow, or even metal in case of asteroids

Screenshots, screenshots!

This part of Voxeland will be changed in the next version. You will be able to use the texture arrays you've already generated, but the way you create them will not be the same. I have to change it to make Voxeland compatible with MegaSplat.
To be honest I'm not happy with the way texture arrays work in Unity, so I decided to create my own texture array tool to use it's API with Voxeland. It will be a standalone tool that I'd like to share via asset store for free. With the help of this tool you will get access to all of the texture arrays features from inspector, with no scripting required. It will be possible to add or extract textures to arrays, resize, change texture array format, read/write, and other stuff.

This one is really challenging. There's no simple way to determine if the block is connected to terrain or not other than iterating the near blocks in 3D space within some particular range... And then oops, the big cave (bigger than range) will have it's roof accidentally removed.

Well, you can use heightmaps generated with any tool as a base for Voxeland terrain. I can't promise the further integration soon.

No. Despite that Voxeland vanilla generators were made from MapMagic ones I don't maintain compatibility with them anymore. You can try creating custom generators by copying Voxeland code if you really need that, but I guess it's easier to reproduce the similar terrain with MapMagic from scratch.

You can set the lowest generate level to 0, it will just create the empty chunks with not a single triangle in them.

The area is pinned automatically once you change any block here.

I don't quite get what you are trying to achieve. What is section of the map? How are you carrying it over to generated land?

 

I firmly believe that the issue is with my lack of experience but I’m really hoping to understand this better. I have my VL terrain set as static in the editor but infinite in play mode. When I press play, I see the static terrain that looks how I see it in the editor. As I move in any one direction, new terrain is generated, by design. When the new terrain is generated, only a single texture will be present.

I am using texture arrays and my static terrain shows 6 textures, as designed. With any new terrain that is generated, only a single texture will appear. Ex. My static terrain- base later grass, layer 1 dirt, layer 2 is yellow grass, layer 3 stone.

When I reach the newly generated terrain (by coming within a specified distance) base layer grass. No additional textures carry over to any of the generated terrains. I have “copy components to terrain” selected as well.

The above is my first issue. The second issue/question is, I don’t know how to go about “pinning” the terrain. My static is set to 300. I would love to be able to “pin” the additional terrains so I can modify them as I see fit. I can achieve this very quickly in MapMagic but VL seems to be harder for me to grasp.

 

Do you mean only the Voxeland generator or could you do this on selected chunks somehow? I think this could be essential to have is the ability to select chunks to drag into a "skip generate" column so that buildings, other terrain or objects can exist in it's place but still be able to generate other terrain out side of those chunks. So a terrain once generated, assign the selected chunks to a "skip generate"column then we could either delete the chunk or disable it.
Lastly an alternative on the selected chunks if you have to, make it so that only the selected chunks added to the column will be generated as level 0. I think this could be a great feature to have and may be a good safeguard against accidentally erasing an area.

I have some confusion that I'm slowly getting over.. there is mapmagic data and then there is Voxeland data. I'm making my terrain with Voxeland mapmagic and after a long while realized that I have to rely on/save the mapmagic data area to save the terrain node information but after closing Unity I have to re add the mapmagic data file to get the nodes to show in the mapmagic node editor and then have to press generate changed if I change something but it erases my pinned areas. It might be better if either the chunk didn't change at all and the terrain edge outside the chunk adapts to the chunk edge although another handy feature would be to optionally to only allow the chunk's material to be changed upon generate and just ignore mesh regeneration.

 

A skip generate to specific chunks would be good and a re organize to data volume would be good to keep the machine only checking on available chunks in the scene.Somehow flagging the end of the volume til a new chunk is made manually by a person whether in game or in editor. because at the moment it goes through and re makes missing chunks starting from middle of terrain out to edges.
I'm not much of a coder just idea's.

 

This looks like a well built and fairly incredible assist that has had a ton of work put into it. I'll be upfront that I am new to game development, but have a bit of a background in programmatic data manipulation. I'm in the research phase for a hobby project that is a builder sim and this looks like it fits my needs, I have been digging through the documentation and old forum posts. I do have two concerns though.

1) Performance. I'm hoping to create a builder sim where the camera is overhead, which means i'll have a good number of chunks visible and I am also hoping to have a larger area that uses the dynamic limited setting. This seems to work okayish depending on how big of an area I try to do, but the update to the collision mesh in the main thread causes some slowdowns. I need to try to changes suggested by laurentlavignes, but that looks promising. I may end up experimenting with the scale as well as I can sacrifice some detail. I'm expecting the AI I want to build to be pretty rough on the CPU, but I should be able to do most of that off the main thread and be okay. If anyone has used Voxeland in a similar way, could anyone report back on the performance?

2) I would like a fairly high degree of control over how my maps are generated. From the documentation, it looks like one way I could accomplish this is to run multiple generations to layer the map and supply a new noise plot with certain block types set to be created or not. The demo has some of these generation features disabled and I am inferring a bit from the wiki as it does not spell it out directly. Is this possible?

 

LucianBlack, Ascensi, Victor_cross, I've got your idea. You need something similar to MapMagic's Pin&Lock feature. I don't know what is the best way to implement it in Voxeland because Voxeland chunks are 100 times smaller than MapMagic's, and there could be only one Voxeland per scene... In other words, they are completely different.
However I will think about the way to implement it. There's an internal "area" class that I can use, I just have to find the way to make it properly.

Does this happen in demo scene too?

I have high hopes on this too, but yet busy with MegaSplat integration, so have not tried it.

I guess you are talking about MapMagic generator rather than Voxeland's build-in. The build-in generator has the fixed number of layers and does not allow to change the way they are applied, so if you'd like to get more control over the terrain generate it won't do. MM allows to use multiple layers with different blocks and different apply types (video).

 

Thanks for the response. I was actually referring the generator in Voxeland. The Wiki didn't have the options expanded and I made a bit of an assumption that if Voxeland could receive data from Magic Map from magic map, it could receive data to create layers from other sources. I watched the Magic Map video a few days back and it looks like an incredible tool. I was actually just hoping to have the fun of coming up with the generation algorithms myself. I will have to play around with it. In any case, thanks for all the work you put into this and for putting out a demo .

 

Thanks Denis, means a lot, I think that would be awesome to implement! I did express another chunk updating method on the World Streamer forum that instead of purely saving the chunks to the scene that with the option selected each chunk is saved as a prefab but instanced/saved in the scene and only chunks that are changed get updated in a update list but those prefabs that are meant to be locked are moved out and put in a separate list that don't get the apply/update prefab and may optionally have a texture update instead. Anyway if these chunk instances could work in a list rather than being exclusive to a Voxeland Generator parent, World streamer can benefit as well. Maybe Voxeland can be made to update only chunks we tag for skipping if the chunks were moved outside of the parent which is what World Streamer would do to make it work. Also the option to have a different tag for color only updating as well would make sense.

 

I have not thought about WorldStreamer integration because Voxeland is kinda world streamer too. But if I had to use it together with WS I would use it out of the scope of WorldStreamer, disabling the WS on Voxeland object and it's chunks (don't really know if it's possible). Let WS stream the objects, while Voxeland will stream the terrain.

 

I think I might be satisfied not having to worry about using WS with Voxeland if Voxeland "Stream Occlusion Culled" rather than InstantOC's Mesh Render focused layer switching. This way a mountain in the far distance could be loaded & rendered with low poly but everything in between the mountain and hill/content in front of you would be unloaded. WS will work with Voxeland in the scene, WS doesn't have to manage Voxeland but it also includes it's own InstantOC like culling. I'm currently investigating if it stream Culls or controls the Mesh Render.

Update: Enjoying the VoxelMagic Biome feature! I wish I could add Vegetation, not exactly sure how to do that just yet. I think the tutorial you have MM 1.5 Biome feature video mainly goes over MM scattered objects but I haven't seen anything related to setting up Voxeland grasses and trees in MM.

When combining multiple biomes is there a empty function we could use kind of like making caves on the Voxeland output blocks? that way a continual path or river can be seamless across biomes.

Also was there a mesh collider margin setting I could change? On some Voxelmagic creations when walking around the character falls through the landscape. I'm trying to create big mountains and wish I had a decent formula for that and a basic understanding how to mix multiple material blocks.

 

When I try to increase the height more than 340 or so, I get spikes in the horizon mesh. Here is a minimal example with a height of 640:


The central part (hi/lo mesh chunks) is generated properly. The horizon mesh has various seemingly random spikes. as I move over the terrain, the hi/lo chunks generate properly.

I first noticed it when working with MapMagic, which if I remember correctly has a hardcoded height set for Voxeland.

If I turn off the horizon mesh everything renders properly, except then the terrain size is of course too small. So for now I'm limited to the height of my terrain, but I'd like to increase it to have large mountains.

Anyone else see this? Any ideas on how to fix it?

Thanks!

 

Reading the Wiki, Voxeland MM height isn't hard coded, it just generates maps with a basic height to start. I know I've had this issue before. I found that when I set the textures blocks to anything but clamped or max the height works well. If you just work in Voxeland then it could be related to detail noise and height values, smoothing, iterations but when you make changes to your basic landscape before painting/sculping try using rebuild to wipe the landscape clean otherwise your scene may compound previous features creating abnormalities. I haven't worked with just Voxeland for a while but these kinds of settings I know can cause issues.

 

Do you mean a layer that is shared between all of the biomes? Unfortunately, no, you'll have to create that cave generators in each of biomes with the same parameters (it's better use import feature to do that).

Not in the settings. But you can try changing line 516 of Chunk.cs or totally comment it out. This is the value that's really hardcoded, it's too internal.

Could you please email me the scene with these Voxeland generate settings?
BTW are these spikes are only on the horizon mesh? Is voxel mesh displayed properly?

You can set the maximum height for MM with the same height field that is used for vanilla generator. It's not hardcoded at all.

 

(I am using translation)

Hello everyone. I bought "Voxeland" yesterday.

So pretty good , but I need help...


I make and use a mechanism to smooth footsteps corresponding to the surface.

It is a method to acquire materials with ray and distinguish footsteps by mainTexture.

But it did not work properly, because mainTexture is null.

Is there a way to get the texture of my location?
Please tell me if there are other methods.

thanks.

 

https://gist.github.com/PhantomIsland-kase/f56f828725cf23a8a4e09a09d365acef

This is its source code.

 

Actually this might work - if I create a terrain/data that has only a single empty block output for the cave system and make that a biome to combine with others. This could be a good workaround then it could be imported to effect a select group of biomes and then import those biomes in another biome level so it can be made not to influence the last.

Update on stacking error I posted earlier -I had a few Voxeland generators in my scene and although I'd only leave one active, my scene file size grew to over 4 GB in size then Unity would just freeze when I'd try to save my scene -user error.. I deleted the other generators I didn't need and everythign was good after that.

@Wright If I sculpted terrains from a multi Biome scene and saved the scene would it also write the save data to each biome or does it save to the current MM data file and nodes or would it save to all?

 

At one point I was thinking that perhaps I was generating values in MapMagic greater than or close to 1 that were causing the problem, so I started building these complicated graphs right before the Voxeland terrain node where I was adding the lower layers together to ensure any given layer would always be less than 1.0 (like I had a bedrock layer, a soil layer, and a grass layer so I would add the three together right before generating the final grass layer to ensure it was not at or above 1.0). But the graphs were getting too complex, and since it was only affecting the horizon mesh and not the regular voxel meshes I decided to drop that approach. But you make a good point, so I should probably go back and play with the graph again.

Sent. And yes, this is only the horizon mesh. The voxel meshes are perfect.

Hmm I'm not sure where I got that idea from. Regardless I've reproduced the problem without MapMagic.

 

So, which version is recommended for Voxeland?

Cause I get this under 2017.2.1p1

EDIT: Get the same warnings in 2017.1.2p4

EDIT 2: Voxeland works fine but the import warnings have me worried. Going to wait for next update to move to 2017.2.1 and beyond. Going to stick to 2017.1.2 for now.

EDIT 3: Spoke too soon. After I was done editing the terrain a bit as a test. Saw the console filled with 160 warnings/errors under 2017.1.2p4. Attached image.

EDIT 4: Downloading 2017.1.2p1 since it was released in December before last Voxeland update. If there are still errors, going to have to go back to Gaia instead.

EDIT 5: Tried it with 2017.1.2p1, same errors. Going back to GAIA. A shame, really liked using it but don't really wanna end up with game breaking bugs in the future. Oh well, going back to 2017.2.1p2 now.

EDIT 6: So if you start a project with GAIA and MegaSplat, will it be easy to convert it to Voxeland terrain in the future? Cause I like Voxeland terrain more and would prefer it. An easy way to switch to Voxeland in current project would be nice (unless there is such a way present already).

EDIT 7: Just an FYI, same errors in 2017.1.1p3, that's September release from last year.

 

Ive having an issue with MapMagic + Voxeland where the caves and crevices dont have any floor and the player falls through the terrain! Any ideas?

 

I had to be careful that the curve spline would be right on zero and end on zero.. if you look at the tutorial closer you'll see the same.

 

Voxeland does not has a single main texture, or, to be precise, it has 20 main textures - one for each channel. You can get them using Material.GetTexture with the names "_MainTex0" - "_MainTex19". Or you can get a Texture2DArray if you are using texture array shader (default) with the name "_MainTexArr".

It's very hard to recall all of the issues by reading the previous posts, and it's nearly impossible to keep all of the issues in mind. If there's something that need to be resolved - could you please report it on the issues page, I will look into all of the bugs right after I'll deal with MegaSplat integration.

Saving a sculpted terrain does not affect MM data in any way. It will save the voxel data for the areas that have any change (area size is 512*512). All of the other "untouched" areas will be generated with MM.

I've got your email, will take a look when I'll finish MegaSplat integration.

TalkieTalkie, when do you get these errors (I mean the ones that displayed with red)? What were you doing? Is there any way to reproduce them? Do they occur in demo scene?
Yellow are warnings, they just say that the value is not used and that stuff, they do not affect Voxeland behavior in any way. However it's rather odd, I usually check for warnings before the submit. Have you enabled debug mode in settings? Could you please take a look at Edit - Project Settings - Player - Scripting Define Symbols to see if _WDEBUG listed in the line?

Will-D-Ramsey,

Or you can add a thin "bedrock" absolute layer to fill the holes with.

 

Scripting Define Symbols for me is blank. I had Playmaker stuff written there but I created a blank project to test again and it was blank this time. Got same yellow warnings on importing Voxeland.

The yellow warnings pop-up when importing Voxeland in a (empty) project is done. The red ones pop-up the moment I select a brush to paint on the terrain (the Scripting Define Symbols changed to Voxeland when I started painting).

Do note that I can still paint on terrain and it works just fine letting me sculpt the terrain or dig down. The red errors however, fill up the log while I am doing so.

 

Any quick tip as to how to do this. Is it easy to see how in the MapMagic / Voxeland tutorial?

 

MapMagic essentially builds layers with Voxeland. The reason there are holes is those are areas where you haven't provided any layer information to Voxeland - those x/z coordinates are basically set to 0.


So you could just create a Voxeland layer with a constant height. In my example, I just set it to 0.01


So now across the Voxeland terrain, there will always be something at least 0.01 units from the base.

 

T

Thanks alot man Ill give this a try after work today. Ive also noticed that my ability to dig into Voxeland terrain stopped working when I started using MapMagic, I was thinking this might be caused by MapMagic locking the terrain to be the same as its output. Does MapMagic keep updating the terrain or just once at the start?

 

No, MapMagic doesn't lock the terrain. It does continue to be used to generate terrain if you are in infinite mode (as you move around and generate new "chunks"), but you should still be able to modify Voxeland manually overriding MapMagic. MapMagic acts similarly to the other generator types.

I'd suggest you check the "Brush" foldout in Voxeland - the default is Standard Edit should be Add, Control Dig, Shift Mode Replace. I don't use Voxeland's input system (I rolled my own) so I am not too familiar with that part. If you are starting with a blank scene you won't have Voxeland's demo scene controls.

 

I see, Ill make sure I check that out as well. I think im using one of the MapMagic demo scenes and trying to integrate Voxeland into it before converting my scene.

 

Ok so I fixed the caves not having floors by plugging a constant value into the cave height. The only problem now is by using the constant value I cant have the cave floor at any other height then the constant.

 

So does this error occur in demo scene or is this something scene-relative? If so, could you please email me the scene?

That's exactly what I mean! Thanks for such a clear explanation!

This could happen after script re-compile if the "save meshes" toggle is turned off. It's a known issue and will be fixed soon, as a quick fix you can use Rebuild button.

Add a Noise (with small intensity) after the constant to add some noise to the bedrock:

 

It's just a new empty scene with asset imported. Didn't open demo scene or anything else.

EDIT: For lulz, tried it out in 2017.3.0f3, same errors.

EDIT 2: Uploading scene file, will email it soon. Do I just send scene or whole project folder?

 

Quick question on how to increase detail distance? So the texture is on all the terrain.

 

Also any chance we could get an updated MapMagic X Voxeland integration video. Both assets have change a bit in the 7 months since the original video and trying to follow it with updated assets is not the best.

 

Just a scene would be enough. BTW could not reproduce the issue in an empty scene.

Does the horizon material have the same shader (texture array or non-texture array) as the main land material?

There were no changes in MapMagic to Voxeland pipeline since then, so the video is still relevant. All of the Voxeland nodes behave the same way, as well as Voxeland generate settings. Are you experiencing any problems trying to follow it?

 

Sent the scene. I honestly have no idea why I'm getting these errors with every Unity version for Voxeland only.

 

That was it big thanks. The only real issue I have now is these weird sheer cliffs where the tiles appear to meet.

It doesn't seem to be applying the textures like the rest of the terrain either. Switching editor mode to Dynamic Infinite changes it a little bit but not in a way that look much different. Any ideas?

 

I had the same issue and found that you can set the loss on that blur in the video to 1 to fix it.

 

Edit: Thanks it worked when I set the blur to 1!

 

@Wright have you had a chance to look into the shader error I'm getting in Unity 2017.3 with the Grass TextureArray? I sent you a message. If you need any other information let me know. Thank you.

 

Are you try to use TertureArrays or just normal textures? And are you using Voxeland?

 

Yes this is with Voxeland 5.2.0. Right now I have to strangely compile twice. I had to compile twice when I was on Unity 2017.2. Then Wright posted a fix for me back in early December last month. But now in Unity 2017.3 a slightly different error started with Voxeland's Grass TextureArray. But on the second compile I don't get the errors. Not sure why.

Error1:
Shader error in 'Voxeland/Grass TextureArray': invalid subscript 'vec' at line 205 (on d3d11)
Compiling Vertex program with SHADOWS_CUBE
Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_RGBM_ENCODING

Error:2:
Error building Player: Shader error in 'Voxeland/Grass TextureArray': invalid subscript 'vec' at line 205 (on d3d11)
Compiling Vertex program with SHADOWS_CUBE
Platform defines: UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_USE_DITHER_MASK_FOR_ALPHABLENDED_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF1 UNITY_SPECCUBE_BOX_PROJECTION UNITY_SPECCUBE_BLENDING UNITY_ENABLE_DETAIL_NORMALMAP SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_LIGHT_PROBE_PROXY_VOLUME UNITY_LIGHTMAP_RGBM_ENCODING

 

Quick question on how to properly make grass the dominant texture on flat surfaces? Ive messed with different settings but it causes issues and im not trying to change the shape of the terrain. My node setup is pretty similar to the tutorial vid.

 

Not sure I can help you with this im not using texture arrays...

 

Also would AQUAS be a good water solution for the Voxeland/MapMagic terrain setup?

 

What I did was change the first curve to be flat at the start and raised to 0.1. That sort of did what I wanted. I had to add a slope node to the dark cliff afterwards. Now I'm just working on adding a dirt layer below the grass.


I was also wondering about the water thing. It's so hard to choose. I haven't purchased any water assets yet but I guess I'm going to have to. I was looking at AQUAS but I'm not sure how great it looks to me. I believe someone said it was working with Voxeland ok though. Sky Master looks pretty cool too and includes water with some nice looking features but I don't know if it will work with them either yet. The new version they're working on looks pretty awesome though and it's on sale until that comes out. People say SUIMONO doesn't perform well enough but it looks kind of nice. I don't want to pay so much for UWS.

Edit: Sorry I forgot, I also set the erosion Cliff output to the slope and that to the dark cliff. Not sure if that's the right way to do it but that's what worked for me.

 

I use Aquas and do not have any issues. Out of the box, it adds a nice look and feel to the terrain. With a simplified ocean creator and a river creator, it did what I wanted it too. I like the foam look on the shore, as well as the underwater camera. There are so many different modifications that you can make, it is impressive. For what I paid for it, quite worth the expense.

 

Yeah this didnt quite work for me thanks anyway! Im basically looking to apply grass based on angle like I did with TC2 before I switched to MapMagic. Im going for mountains with grassy plains.