Sandbox - Next Gen Terrain

Hey there folks.


I have been working on a really cool terrain system that is a nice replacement to Unity's built in terrain system. I know they have been working on something and we have all been waiting patiently for a solution but it still hasn't happened yet with very little updates. I took it upon myself to sit down this past month and work really hard on a truly awesome solution that can help many studios.

I call it "Sandbox".

Here are the features:

It is whatever poly(triangle / vert) count you want Low poly or high poly.
It supports 12 Textures.
It has auto texturing based on height and normals (slopes).
It has manual texture blending.
It has 1 manual texture painting.
It supports cliffs and overhangs.
1 draw call! (+1 draw call for shadows)

Here is my current tool list:

Auto Painting,
Manual Painting,
Raise,
Lower,
Smooth,
Erosion Y,
Erosion XYZ,
Origin XZ,
Origin XYZ,
Grab,
Inflate,
Pinch,
Level,
Grow Normal,
Push Normal,
Lock (vert),
Unlock (vert),
Subdivide (triangle)
Weld (triangles & verts)


So on to the technical stuff:
No Splat Maps: Here is the cool part for it to support 12 textures I encode the data right on the object/model. It doesn't use any splat maps of any kind!
Triplanar 4, 8, 12 Texure Shader.

It currently is made as an editor extension but it can work fully work in runtime, and to prove it here is a runtime demo:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1660807/Sandbox/Sandbox.html


Some screenshots:

(took less than 8 seconds to create)


TODO:
I will be adding many many features over the coming weeks and months so if you have any ideas now is the time.
(prefab based and procedural)
Tree brush,
Rock brush,
Grass Brush
Stream system,
Lava System,
Road System,
Weather eco system ( clouds, stars, sun/moon, dust, wind, rain, storms, lighting.),
Voxel Toggle for caves...

Many many more things to come but I wanted to get this out there now and start getting feedback.


My plan is to release this to the asset store when it is ready for ~ $45 but before I set it to paid it will be completely free during alpha and beta phases.

Also if you make any cool stuff with this post the screenshots here and show them off, I am not an artist and love to see what people can create!

Thanks everyone and keep on creating!
-Dustin

 

This as a terrain creation tool alone would be awesome. Where do I sign up for beta testing?

 

Very cool, I need exactly this system for my Racing game.
It's possible to make 2 textures, 3 texture, 4 texture for Mobile?

 

Cool.

 

can we make caves ?

 

"Voxel Toggle for caves" on the to do list, yay!

 

Bookmarked.

 

Sign me up for testing! Cheers

 

Your system works with plane only or I can import a fbx ?

 

Well I posted this here to gauge interest, even one person interested is enough to motivate me to get it cleaned up and ready for public use. I'll post again here as soon as I send the beta to the asset store. Thanks!

 

Do you mean custom shaders? Right now it supports up to 12 and I can actually go all the way up to 16 if I was crazy enough...you could use one texture if you wanted all the way up to 12. In my demo it only used 4. But I do plan on giving people the option of having smaller shaders for clean optimization purposes.

I also haven't added it yet but I can add support for normal mapping at some point.

By the way I forgot to mention that entire demo is using only 1 draw call + 1 draw call for shadows.

 

Yes I mean a shader for Mobile, with 2 textures, 3 and 4 textures.

 

Currently you can make caves in the live demo without adding any polygons just by raising the terrain and then using the grow or push normals tools. In the editor you can also add detail where you want. The current limitation is punching a hole through the other side so I've decided to go the voxel route for that.

 

Ha ha asking the fun sneaky questions... It works with any model in any orientation(kind of) That is a procedural plane in the demo. But...it will be limited. I also plan on releasing a more non terrain sculpting and painting solution for standard models. (soon tm)

 

You got it! I'll make the whole array 1-12. I'll post a picture later of the shader overview I designed it in shader forge. It is very complicated but it runs hyper fast.

 

Does/will it work with spheres? Sign me up for testing either way!

 

Yes. It does any model in any orientation the results currently are mainly intended for plane only but at some point it will be anything you can throw at it. The key is to have a fair amount of verts for your brush to be useful.

 

Don't forget you can drive the sample car around to test your terrain.

 

Looks quite sick! I would love some place to signup for future news and maybe a beta test! (I forget to update forum threads regularly)

 

No signup necessary! I will just send it to the asset store as free during beta.

 

I will post more screenshots this weekend to show what kind of terrains you can create. Anything from toon, to fantasy, to realism.

 

This is amazing! As one who loves to handcraft parts of my terrain, I have been so frustrated with Unity's terrain controls. I have used several different terrain creation tools and other engines that have better systems than Unity...and this was a number of years ago. Moving to Unity was a huge disappointment for me with regard to terrain creation, which is my favorite part of level making.

I will definitely be beta testing this one and in line for purchasing it at release if it continues to look so promising. Thank you for doing this. It is desperately needed.

 

What about LODing? How about vegetation optimisations? And what about advanced shader features such as POM?

 

The first two are important to me as well. We still need optimization of vegetation in order to use large numbers of trees/plants on the terrain. So hopefully, this is something on the list. As for POM, not sure shaders should be part of this, mostly because we all use terrain for different things, including mobile, desktop, etc. Some of us want higher quality and so we use our own shader system, such as RTP. Others care about performance more than quality.

I find that shaders are highly personal based on the project.

Oh..and I want to be able to export a height map.

 

The reason why I asked about that is that it seems his custom shader is pretty essential to his approach. So solutions like RTP aren't really an option there. Speaking of which... Any plans for mesh-terrain blending?

 

Ah, that would sort of ruin it for me. I want to be able to use my own shaders.

 

@ Teila & christoph_r

I want to do a lot and have lots of plans on the back burner. Right now my goal is to take it piece by piece and just start working with the core features needed then work on optimizations and new features down the road. My core development is mobile personally so I am all about having things run ridiculously smooth! All I can say is it is too early to tell you my game plan as I am still coming up with one but I can tell you everything you guys mentioned is on my mind!

 

That sounds like a reasonable way to go about this. Too bad you're focusing on mobile, but that's understandable. There's definitely a market for that.

 

All the more reason to make the tool versatile. That way, those of us using desktop can use RTP with it or our own shaders. Either way, even if we can't use this, I am glad to see someone addressing the issues.

 

Im not focusing on mobile, that is just my lowest common computer. If I can make it work well and optimized on mobile that means I can crank up the settings for desktops and VR.

 

You've definitely got a lot on your plate then. I'm looking forward to your progress.

 

Oh for sure my todo list is really a rough roadmap I'm sure it will get more detailed overtime as well.

 

Got grass starting to work!

 

mmmmm. lush! Any thoughts on getting a plant/tree randomizer going, for mass placement?

 

Yes that is exactly what I'm working on next trees shrubs rocks... Random prefab placement by values and weights.

 

How big can it comfortably get? I've currently got a prototype in the works where I'd like 4km x 4km with overhangs and caves.

I'd also like to be able to dig. The digging doesn't have to be anything fancy. Simple round tunnels and general lowering of an area.

 

It all depends on the polygon settings of the map the lower the polygon count means you could make it really really big. The map in the demo is around 5k triangles you could easily get 10 of those for a super large map, and it would still run really smooth.

 

in pretty much interested, i tried your demo doing tunel and caves but after few minutes of mesh manipulation i ended with a bunch of bugged verticles

 

Ya playing with some of the tools can be pretty destructive, if it gets too messy make sure and use the origin brushes that will fix the vertices to their original positions.

 

If you could add a option to make terrain cubical, I'd freaking love you forever

 

Yes I second that! Cubical and Iam in.

 

@Steelshot
@Devision4
Actually it currently can work with any shape you throw at it, the results may not be exactly what you want though. Can you show me an example of what you are thinking?

 

Think of the game Cube World ^_^

 

Also last request, do you think you'd be able to make it voxel? Like a marching cubes

 

So you mean like cubes everywhere with the same brush tools? That could be pretty fun.
At some point yes I for sure want to add voxel areas for large expansive caves and what not.

 

Yes cubes. I've been searching the Web for like 2 months for that type of thing.

 

When will be released?

 

I'm verrrrrry interested in this, will you add the ability to raise terain based on heightmaps?

Where is the link to the free beta I would like to test.

 

Yes, like cubeworld, minecraft, trove ..

 

able to convert an existing unity terrain into this? I would love to give it a try
have you had a chance to compare performance between unity terrain and your system on mobile phones?

And yeah... unity has been saying they'll update their terrain system since... Unity 2? that's over 5 years already. And now that the roadmap is public, you can see that on the 5.x roadmap it says "maybe we update the terrain engine". Which usually stands for no-f-way-on-this-version. To me, Unity terrain is the worst system they have still pending without updates. It's so bad they don't even use it themselves on the demos (the blacksmith demo doesn't use the terrain). Anyway, enough complaining. I hope your system does finally help mitigate the nightmare U terrain.