[Tool/Showcase] Grand designer, the procedural universe generator V1.0 is out (-15% promotion)

Hi everyone,

Grand designer, the procedural universe generator, is available in V1.0 on Steam, no more early access. It's a planet, asteroid, terrain and space backgrounds creation tool that you can use easily with unity.
The software itself is built using unity 5 and DX11 directcompute shaders using NGUI for the interface.
You can export textures sets (albedo, normal map, smoothness, ambient occlusion) that you can use directly with Unity as well as the optimized geometry of the planet. A sample scene is also provided in the package to help you to integrate it in your projects.

Here is the trailer of the V1.0 :

The -15% promotion will last a week (ends 04-20-16), check the store page

 

Hey Ignishot,
interesting Asset, albeit I have some questions on how it works and if it fits into a project I'm planning.
Is the procedural engine also available in Unity itself (good) or am I required to manually export huge data for each planet and import it into Unity (bad)? What I need is a Tool which saves the parameters of a planet as tiny data and which generates the planet during runtime from these parameters. How your tool works is not entirely clear to me since you animate planets and fly over the surface and I don't know if it is in your tool or in Uniy.
Are mesh colliders generated?
How is the atmospheric rendering handeled and which options are exposed (color, density, fog, height, clouds)?
Is it able to create Gas Giants?
Are craters possible?
On what kind of Sphere mesh is it based and can you tell something about resolution, subdivision and LOD?
Thanks for your time.

 

Hi,
Several of your questions are answered in the description of the product on the steam store page, here is a summary :
The tool is a stand alone tool that generate texture sets and geometry that you can import in unity (and, of course, on other engine too).
It's not able to render everything directly from unity due to many constraints, the biggest one being the fact that you need a DX11 card to do it, so, it will restrict the to only windows usage, no Android/IOS/multi platform ... That's one of the reason why it's a standalone app and not a procedural engine like the one use in No Man's sky or other similar projects
The tool is made to be used with many usage models ... you can create snapshots, movies (series of snapshots), planet models or portions of planets. If you generate the mesh, you can use this mesh as collider, of course, you can define the simplification level at the export.
It generates a regular sphere (2 poles) with a Longitude-Latitude texture format and export the whole thing simplified or not. Texture can be up to 4k x 2k with the regular tool, up to 16k x 8k with the Pro-DLC.
The animation system is used only to generate movies, as this requires to recompute everything at every frame if you want to animate the parameters.
The atmospheric rendering is available in the tool for snapshots and movies, the sample provided for unity is a simplified atmospheric shader optimized to be used in realtime even on lower end platforms.
Gas Giants are possible, you can see snaphost in the product page (screenshots are made with an older version, but are still valid) : http://www.ignishot.com/grand-designer.html

 

Hey Ignishot,
thanks for your explanation and clarification. And sorry that I researched not properly enough.

Can you please give an example how much memory is required for a planet with medium details? Because I need hundreds of planets, moons and asteroids. I think the memory consumption and the workflow (export, import, assign, manage) would be a real hassle.

Does that mean the produced output is also limited to DX11? And from what I read in threads about abandoned procedural planet generators for unity there is a huge demand for a supported InUnity solution and the people could probably live with the DX11 limitation. But they also ask for a dynamic subdivision and LOD system.

Thats my biggest concern. In my experiments with planet generation the latlong sphere had ugly texture sampling artifacts at the poles. When I switched to an Icosphere these improved a bit but did not completely vanish.

I see a few craters on the screenshots. How are they handeled? Only same size ones possible?

 

Well if depend on your needs ... if you want the full set of textures (Albedo, roughness, normal, ao) it will be something like that :
2k x 1k ~= 4 x 8Mb (raw textures) ~= 4 x 1.3Mb (DXT compressed)
4k x 2k~= 4 x 32Mb (raw textures) ~= 4 x 5.3Mb (DXT compressed)
8k x 4k~= 4 x 128Mb (raw textures) ~= 4 x 21.3Mb (DXT compressed)
The AO is probably not mandatory (gain 25% in room) and the size of the mesh is quite insignificant here.
Depending on size of the planets on screen, your needs may be different ...

No, not at all, it's precisely why I've made it stand alone as this allows the usage of the textures/meshes on any platforms as it's generated offline.
I've already been asked to provide a runtime generator for unity, it's definitely something interesting to do, but will require quite a lot of work, especially to have a decent workload balance and stuff like that. It's a long term project, I still have to see where things are leading me in the following months, who knows ...

Yes, I know that it's not a perfect way of doing things, but it simplifies things a lot in my case. I'm considering other UVs since a long time, but had no time yet to work on the implementation, but it's definitely a thing I'd like to implement.
But there are some textures treatments that I'm doing to reduce the problems at poles ... not perfect, but better.

There is a separate tab just for the craters, with more than 20 parameters to play with. You can change their size, depth, height, regularity, age, trails size ... etc

Here is a screenshot of the parameters ilst:

 

I always loved procedural generation. Great work! It would be nice to be able to create stars as well.

 

Thanks! All oceans can be emissive, so, you can do it that way.

 

Sorry to dig up this old thread. Firstly, congrats for the great work!
I wanted to ask if it's possible to use this at runtime also or it's only for offline generation.