Voxeland - Voxel Terrain Tool

You have to raise the grass layer - the easiest way to do it is to adjust it with a curve like this:

I have not looked deep into it, but at first glance it will take longer then I expected. To be honest, using texture arrays for the grass could be really a hassle. I'd like to recommend you using the non-texture array shader with an atlas texture instead.

 

That's basically what I was after too. I still have to work on the dirt and sand layers and see if I can get a beach going and stuff but here are some other images. I used portals to test different curves.



I also added some trees and grass stuff but I'm not done with those yet. Also will be cool to add different biomes and hook everything together. Pretty neat stuff!

 

@Wright Denis, is there a way to make the "block" size smaller?

 

Heya. I have a quick question about using this with invector shooter.

I would like to make explosives destroy terrain but IANAP would it be possible?

 

Yes, you can scale the voxeland object down.

There's a spherical volume brush. Digging terrain with it works pretty similar to the explosives in Worms. All you have to do is to apply it with your script at given coordinates. Three lines of code:

Code (CSharp):

1. Coord coord = new Coord(myExplosionX, myExplosionY, myExplosionZ);
2. Brush brush = new Brush() { form=Brush.Form.volume, extent=myExplosionSize };
3. voxeland.Alter(coord, brush, Voxeland.EditMode.dig, 0, -1, -1);

 

Thanks! That looks like a good start

I figured it would have something to do with adding a brush to the explosive :v

So how would I add these three lines to my explosive script? I followed the link from the doc that talks about doing this with a script but I am still unsure where to begin : X

Thanks again. Sorry for being a nub.

 

I had the same issue with grass appearing below the terrain when I tried to double it's scale and the errors from this quick fix are:

So I'm thinking that probably a dev version of Voxeland has to be used or at least parts of it but I haven't tried that just yet.

Update: The grass fix worked with the dev versions of everything. Although I had to do a little fixing of some of the code to get things to compile again but it's looking pretty good! Just some minor UI glitches on the Voxeland grass and object nodes in the MapMagic editor, and didn't see any checkbox to disable the elements in the Voxeland node anymore. Also some of my Noise nodes said they were outdated so I had to replace them. Probably would be better to wait for the next versions of things to be ready.

 

Is there a prefab of that brush I can spawn with my explosion to take chunks out? I am not the best at programming

 

Look at this. Might need some tweaks though.

Attach it to a GameObject. Position it and scale it for where you want the explosion.

Explosion "fires" when the component is enabled.

I recommend you go through some programming tutorials, like this one:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/scripting/coding-unity-absolute-beginner

Good luck!

 

That worked perfectly! Thanks so much

 

How can I prevent trees from floating above the terrain D: just noticed this in my land

 

This fix should work with the latest Voxeland from the asset store. If you mean new Voxeland beta from GitLab under the "dev version" then there's no need to apply this fix since it's already included here.

JasonCG, GJ!

It depends on a way you generate your terrains and trees - whether you use MapMagic, or vanilla generators, or create trees manually.

 

PS to make Voxeland compatible with MegaSplat I decided to make a tool to work with texture arrays (aka Texture2DArray). Both assets use them, but use them differently. This tool can create texture arrays, display them properly in inspector, add, remove layers, and do other stuff:

​

It will be available at the asset store soon. For free, of course.

PPS yep, it's Voxelump here in video

 

Thanks for the info
Is there a way to add a specific tag to each "chunk" that spawns at runtime

 

Nevermind got it

Found the "copy tags and layers" option on the voxel land object

 

YAY for Voxelump! Looking forward to the ability to make floating islands... or even just floating chunks like those in Avatar movie!

It sounds as if the Texture2DArray isn't something that is MegaSplat specific. Have you tested with other terrain shader systems? I'm wondering if it might work with CTS as well.

 

Yes, I tested the dev versions of Voxeland, MapMagic and Plugin Tools and the grass worked properly when scaling the Voxeland object with those. However, I got the errors I mentioned when I used the version of Voxeland and MapMagic from the asset store with the quick fix you provided. Maybe you sent the wrong file?

Also, while I'm here maybe someone can help me out. When using the MapMagic generator how can I make biomes randomly appear throughout the world in infinite mode and fade together properly?

For example, if I wanted a simple flat grasslands biome and the occasional random lake in it. That could be 2 biomes, one a grassland and one a lake. I can't figure out the random part, and I can't get them to go to the right heights or sizes and they hardly fade into one another, if at all, when using the technique shown in the biome video. I've also tried adding a forest and desert biome to the mix but that only makes it worse. Sometimes the various nodes and objects I place are somehow overlayed together but the texture is very quick, if not instant.

I even made simple as possible biomes where it is one single texture in the Voxeland output with constant 1 and using the biome setup as shown in the video except with tile wrap mode on the simple form node and the texture is instant from one to the other. Plus the smoothness I added using the max relax iterations seems to come back as well. So maybe there's some sort of weird bug where things from Voxeland don't get sent through to MapMagic or something.

 

Found the "copy tags and layers" option on the voxel land object

Thanks again

What can I change in this script to make it add to the terrain? Is that possible?

 

Check out the line with:

Code (CSharp):

1. voxeland.Alter(coord, brush, Voxeland5.Voxeland.EditMode.dig, 0, -1, -1);

Voxeland's Alter method is what is actually doing all the work here.

Here is the definition of this method:

Code (CSharp):

1. Alter(CoordDir center, Brush brush, EditMode mode,  int landType=-1, int objectType=-1, int grassType=-1) {
2. ...
3. }

The possible Edit Modes are add, dig, replace, smooth. The "-1" for land, object, and grass types basically tells Voxeland that you don't want to change those things.

So you will want to change EditMode from "dig" to "add". But you will also need to specify what block type you want to add (rock, grass, etc.). That is the "landType" parameter. If you look at Voxeland in the inspector, the Land Blocks section, the first one is land type 0, the second is land type 1, and so on.

So ultimately you'll want a line that looks something like this:

Code (CSharp):

1. int landType = 2; // landType is the block type you want to set
2.  
3. voxeland.Alter(coord, brush, Voxeland5.Voxeland.EditMode.add, landType, -1, -1);

Putting it all together:

Code (CSharp):

1. public void SetLand(Vector3 center, int radius, int landType) {
2.         var voxelCoords = WorldToVoxeland(voxeland, center);
3.         coord.x = voxelCoords.x;
4.         coord.y = voxelCoords.y;
5.         coord.z = voxelCoords.z;
6.  
7.         brush.form = Voxeland5.Brush.Form.volume;
8.         brush.extent = radius;
9.         voxeland.Alter(coord, brush, Voxeland5.Voxeland.EditMode.add, landType, -1, -1);
10.     }

 

Thanks for the help!

I tried to edit that terrain explosion script. I added everything after "setland" and kept explode as I would get the error "the name explode does not exist in the current context" if I just replaced that part of the code

I am now getting an error "No overload for method "Explode" Takes 2 arguments"

 

That might be because I added a third parameter to the SetLand function, the actual land type. You will probably want to specify which land block type you actually want to create rather than a hard coded value.

But take a look at the attached file. Basically attaching this to a GameObject will make it either "explode" or "set land" by ticking the "explodePosition" value in the inspector.

You could create two prefabs: one that explodes (explodePosition unticked), the other that, uh, sets land (with explodePosition ticked). And the variable "setLandType", which is also exposed in the inspector, is the actual land type you want to set the blocks to.

 

That works great! Thanks so much!

 

I am having some trouble with black terrain/world after building on android

 

@Wright Would it matter in the final Voxeland that each biome added was set to unlimited for their creation or must they each be set to static before saving the MM data?

Asking another way trying to understand biomes - is it ok to have each biome set as unique Dynamic or static limited size or must all terrain parts be set to the same Dynamic or static size when creating biomes?

When I first created my biomes I had them set to infinite to see the area I wanted to keep but left them at infinite but now in the final terrain with the biomes it feels like a big drop in performance as if each of the biomes are calculating & combining in its own layer Dynamic Infinite.

Although I asked this before but didn't get an answer, this might be the actual cause of performance issue with Biomes - I had to set up the final Voxeland with having two Voxeland outputs - one for main terrain and a Biome and then two other biomes on the other output. The materials and Biomes blended perfectly.. I couldn't figure out how to blend 3 or more textures on a single Voxeland output so I was forced to use two -is this safe? or is it not recommended?

 

Static or dynamic mode has nothing to do with biomes. Changing this mode does not affect generating in any way, except that it triggers generate area when camera approaches them.

Note that in areas where two biomes are blended both of them will be generated - and this can reduce generate performance twice.

If you are not experiencing issues with your Voxeland Output configuration then it's okay to use them this way. However I had not tested it and can't guarantee that some issue will arise further.

Try to disable texture arrays feature (and don't forget to change the land shader).

I'm going to release the fixed Voxeland version this week anyways.

It's hard to say for sure without seeing your graph, but I'd like to recommend you fiddle with MapMagic vanilla terrains first, not using Voxeland - just to get familiar with the biomes, masks and blending. Try to follow the tutorial you've mentioned (again, with no Voxeland involved) as a start.

 

Is there multiplayer support with photon?

 

Good evening!

I've created a Voxeland object in editor mode (no need for runtime modification in my project) and sculpted it as I require. I'm finding that when I stop work for the day, save my scene, and then reload Unity next time, there are often small spontaneous changes to my Voxeland terrain. This causes me some grief for certain features of my terrain, for example I have some very small, shallow holes that are nesting sites for alien creatures.

I'm also finding that there is a bit of lag (about 3 or 4 seconds) in the editor UI when I save the scene. I'm using both Voxeland and Archimatix in the same scene, and I thought this lag was due to Archimatix. But removing all the Archimatix objects from the scene didn't change it, and Voxeland is the only other procedural asset in use. I don't really want to complain about this, because my Voxeland object is small in size (about 200 meters diameter, roughly circular) but sculpted in complex ways with a lot of caverns, holes, etc. I know Voxeland has a lot to do when it rebuilds.

For the two reasons above, I'm looking for a way to "bake out" my Voxeland geometry and textures to a regular mesh object, or better yet, an object per Voxeland chunk so it can be more granular in occlusion culling. Is there a recommended way to do this? Should I be looking at creating my own C# script to bake out a Mesh asset file? I'm betting this wheel is already invented by someone.

One other question I have: I have a baked navmesh over my Voxel terrain, but I'm finding that my AI-controlled humanoid characters have difficulty walking on it even if I set their step size fairly high (0.5 meters or more). It appears the third-person AI controller from Unity Standard Assets (which is what I'm using for testing) is interpreting the individual voxel boundaries as very steep slopes. My voxel terrain *looks* visually smooth in the areas where I'm trying to walk my NPCs, so I'm not sure what to do to fix this. Again, this is probably a problem already solved by someone else, and I'm sure it's something I need to change in NPC settings and not a Voxeland issue per se. Any suggestions where I should look for my error?

Voxeland is a lot of fun to use, and my alien terrain looks terrific in the scene, much more visually interesting than a standard Unity terrain could be.

 

Voxeland data could be converted to array of bytes and sent via the net: doc
All of the instant playmode changes could be sent via your custom script and applied using Alter method: doc

You can try pressing rebuild after the scene save. This should generate the new meshes from scratch using current data. Actually I haven't noticed such a behavior. Is there any chance to reproduce it?

Do you have "save meshes to scene" turned on in settings? If so, then Voxeland is already actually baked (and "re-bakes" after any change). You can completely remove Voxeland component and see your terrain is loading and looking as similarly to Voxeland. Btw saving this mesh is what could take time on scene save - especially when it's quite complex.

You can try disabling "Hide collider wire" toggle in settings (and press rebuild) to see what the collision wire NPC use to move actually is. It's using 4 times less triangles than hi-poly Voxeland mesh, so there could be some differences between collider and visual meshes.

 

This is my first Voxeland project, and the data is about 6 gigabytes, so it's not really feasible to send it to you. I can try to clone the Voxeland object into another scene (does that work?) and send you just that.

Ah, yes, that explains it. Thanks for clarifying.

Again, thanks for the info. I didn't realize Voxeland generated a lower-poly collision mesh. That's a good feature, and I'll examine the collisions now that I know it's not the same as the visual.

Many thanks for the quick reply!

 

Good news!
I'm currently working on MegaSplat integration, and wanted to share some tests. It works!

PS it will take some time to upload it, I'm on the slow connection

 

I think I have figured out what is going wrong here, and I believe it is my illiteracy with respect to the documentation.

Until last night, I thought "Rebuild" took whatever the current editing results for the Voxeland object are, and rebuilt the in-scene mesh from that. It appears, however, that (at least with the settings I'm using) Voxeland is rebuilding from the most recent saved version of the scene. If that's correct, then that explains the behavior I have observed, and I whack myself on the side of the head and stop doing that.

I did some further editing testing last night and was able to replicate the "problem", but also to cure it by always saving my scene before hitting Rebuild.

Along the way, I did observe a couple of minor problems that I thought you might want to know about:

• I'm still having issues with stray voxels floating in the air near my main mesh. These often seem to appear if I have smoothed the terrain using the Blob brush type. Usually I can select and delete them, but occasionally I find a couple that I can light up with the brush but which don't actually go away when I try to "dig" them. This happened with one such voxel last night, but when I saved the scene and then hit Rebuild it was gone.
• In one case, the orange brush decal actually saved with my scene somehow, and was visible when I went into play mode. I dug around in Voxeland and discovered that it's actually a separate MeshRenderer (clever how you did that), and I couldn't reproduce the problem, but you might want to look at the code paths that should disable that renderer and make sure they all do so. It wasn't a big deal, and I cleared it by going back into edit mode on that object, moving the brush elsewhere (it picked right up where it had been), then moving the cursor out of the scene window before deselecting the Voxeland object. This is not a problem I've seen before, so unfortunately it's one of those sneaky little intermittent bugs that are really hard to isolate. Sorry.
• On the subject of that MeshRenderer object for the brush, I have a feature request: Could you consider having that exist somewhere other than under the Voxeland main GameObject, or else disable its entire GameObject rather than just the Component when the user exits voxel edit mode? The reason I suggest this is that I need to mark my Voxeland object as static for lightmap, navmesh, etc., and that object is getting marked alongside its siblings, so it's actually getting calculated into the maps.

Finally, I'd like to ask a documentation-related question. I've read the manual about saving with scene, saving to an asset file, etc. I am currently saving to scene mainly but have also done some saves to an asset file as (I hope) backups in case I accidentally make a mess of my Voxeland object. I understand how to "do" each of the save methods, but I'm not sure I understand their relationship on the existing object. For example, if I've been saving an object with the scene, and then I save it to an asset file, is it now coupled to the asset file, or was the asset file just a clone of its settings for archival purposes or to use in another project? What exactly does Release of the asset file do vis-a-vis save with scene? Any clarification you can offer would be appreciated, and I'm sorry for being obtuse. I did RTFM, but I'm not sure I understand that section.

Thanks!

 

That is awesome now if we can get it all tied together with mapmagic nodes woot woot.
I almost wan't to hire you as my terrain guy lol, looking for side work?

 

Having quite a few warnings with 2017.3 wondering if those will get worked on soon?

User Error, disregard lol.

 

@Wright congrats! I'm very excited for you and Voxeland! can't wait to see it released!!

 

Just looked over the gitlab, man lots of improvements to voxeland, send me plx! lol

 

Just a heads up, the new version of RTP does not work, error is about DrawWithBackground around line 406 of voxeland.layout

Adding that the same issue I posted in MapMagic is also in Voxeland CustomSerialization.cs around 470 is another k.tangentMode

These are just warnings for now but figure might as well fix it before they decide to completely remove it from deprication to just gone and breaks for real

With the one around 470 im gonna have to test weightedMode because setting that tangentMode is escaping me that enum doesnt work the same.

This is what I am trying k.weightedMode = (WeightedMode)lineMembers[6].Parse(typeof(int)); I will let you know how it goes, however weightedMode works just a tiny bit different so well see.

Ok so this solution causes some chucks to overlap every so often (considering I am not sitting around playing for hours thats too often) I.E. not a working solution

 

Ok it is getting late, on Friday, you said this week, I am eaaaager!!!!

 

Could you please report these bugs at the issues page with the steps to reproduce them? I.e. description of what exactly I have to do to see the brush saved, or to floating blocks that disappear after rebuild, etc.

I't more of a unity-related stuff rather then Voxeland. Consider it storing a prefab from scene game object. When you save the scene no longer keeps it all, but just a reference to it. All of the asset changes to asset are now have effect in scene even if it's not loaded - as well as changing prefab object will have effect in all scenes it's used.

But, seriously, I'm creating MapMagic biomes to order from time to time, but bear in mind that hiring me for the contract project will cost you much more than a single Voxeland or MapMagic license, since the costs are not spread between multiple customers. Email me for details.

I plan to submit new Voxeland version (5.3) today
However I'm not sure RTP fix will be included here, I haven't estimated the amount of work here.

 

HAHA yes I expect it would cost much more, The price of Voxeland isn't enough value for 3 hours of your time doing contract labor imo. You are skilled sir.

 

No problem I was just checking compatability while I was working out errors and warnings with the beta. I don't actually use RTP

 

Hi!
I'm trying to create my shader in amplify SE, but I can not figure out how I can access the texture blending mask (it's a map / UV / ...?)
Please tell me how I can access this data (TextureArray / and not TextureArray)
(CTS and similar solutions do not suit me)

Thx!

 

Wait for the fixes, I have been strugglin with the new version of Unity and Voxeland wanting to not work with custom shaders. He has a lot of fixes that are hitting this next release. After that I would be happy to sit with ya over discord or something and well splat together!

 

Done, as best I could under the circumstances, since the two bugs are very intermittent. I can't tell you how to reliably reproduce them, because they aren't happening every time for me.

I filed two issues and a feature request.

So, are you saying that when I save my Voxeland object to an asset, the in-scene object is then linked to that asset file (as if Voxeland were a renderer linked to a mesh asset file)? That makes sense to me, assuming I have correctly understood what you're saying.

 

Depends of what do you have in mind under the "Voxeland object". If it's the Data from Settings - then yes, you will have a separate blocks data file, and an engine to build a mesh from it and decorate with textures. You can use it in the other Voxeland object in the other scene, and all of the changes made will be applied to all Voxeland objects.

If you switch Mesh Channel Encoding (in older/current versions: RTP Mode toggle) to RTP mode and rebuild the terrain you will have block types blends stored in mesh vertex color channels: R for channel 1, G for 2, B for 3, A for 4. Default Voxeland and MegaSplat channel encoding support up to 24 and 256 channels respectfully, but use insane formulas to pack them.

 

Thanks for the additional reply. I'll set up a sandbox project to test my understanding of what you have said, to make sure I've got it right.

 

Starting to put together the stable build. Just a little performance test after some tweaking

Video quality is terrible, but Thats at 1920x1080 with everything maxed out

 

btw around this time last year I was able to work out using mapmagic nodes to properly generate sand under water and shorelines/beaches. As well as keep my trees from being underwater. I can't seem to work that out anymore and I feel like a couple of the things I used are gone. Any suggestions?

 

Hi there,

I decided to take a gander at your lovely asset. I've owned it for a while, but ran into so many headaches with other voxel solutions in the store that I was a bit gun shy to dig in. I watched a couple demos online and decided I needed to check Voxeland out since I also own MapMagic. I am glad I did too. What an awesome knockout combination.
I was trying to run the linear demo in the Voxeland asset and noticed there was a couple scripts missing on the camera. How do I fix it, which scripts belong there?

TIA,
Boysenberry

 

Just disable them, I think he fixed that along with a lot of other stuff, the next version hopefully will be here soon(tm)

 

After the update (5.3) I uploaded "Voxeland" and "MapMagic" to the new project:

Assets/Voxeland/Main/Generator.cs(877,19): error CS0234: The type or namespace name `Graph' does not exist in the namespace `MapMagic'. Are you missing an assembly reference?