Procedural worlds

being a one person team, procedural creation is very appealing .. but it is also very tricky.

the purpose of this thread is to try different tools from the asset store, different methods, mix them .. trying to establish how far i can go with procedural creation and what is the best workflow to get me there.

if you would like to share the results of your own experiments, you are more than welcome .. after all, this thread is about research.

 

Toolbox : Gaia , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Allsky

 

Toolbox : Gaia , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Allsky

 

Toolbox : Gaia , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Allsky , Ultimate VFX , statue from Big Environment Pack

exceptionally, a few things handplaced on this one

 

Toolbox : Gaia , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Allsky

 

You seem to be using a lot of the same tools on each one. It's interesting to see the integrated results, but for me it'd be more helpful to see what each one can do just on its own.

 

I actually think these kinds of screenshots are a bit counter productive, posting nice looking mostly closeup shots of generated terrains based largely on skybox and bloom doesn't really show what the generator is doing.

You could reproduce most of these screenshots manually in like 3-5 minutes and less than 30 clicks.

Truth is though, the vast majority of the visual appeal here comes from entirely covering the ground in grass and skybox + bloom.

Don't get me wrong, I really love grass, but I think gaia's grass placement logic is one of the main reasons I never used it. It's incredibly inefficient and layers multiple chunks on the same spot way too often.

 

Toolbox : Map Magic , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Cinematic suite

 

...

 

Ok, I'll shut up and enjoy the nice screenshots

 

I consider these as environmental art and they are beautiful. Maybe not practical as is for a game that anyone can actually play on their computers, but still...art.

 

I did say, "Ok, I'll shut up and enjoy the nice screenshots "!

I personally like the second set better. But that has more to do with the color pallet I think and the denser tree placement. Gaia can certainly produce a denser tree sets as well.

 

I'll confess I haven't heard of any of these tools.

Somebody should write a nice blog post introducing them, with some compare & contrast on their feature set (and of course some pretty pictures!).

 

playable demo of the previous world

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6nctd0b4c00n1wu/pods.7z?dl=0

give it a few seconds at start .. time for the infinite world to build itself

 

a quick try at a procedural town ...

Toolbox : Map Magic , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Artic Castle , Cinematic suite

 

procedural modelling

Toolbox : Archimatix beta , Cinematic suite

 

Guys, please, please somebody explain me the SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens. I can see it is used almost everywhere! After I make 3D Models and bring to Unity, I cant get the feel I want and they dont just look as good as these pictures! Does this Package has to do with that?
In what manner?

Thank you!

 

SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens is just a bloom effect .. check their demo on the assets store .. it is very easy to use and offer great results.
i believe what you are looking for is the Cinematic suite .. it offers color corrections tools , the same way you would work in photoshop.
The Unity guys made a great job whith this suite ... well done guys
but it is only for Unity 5.3 and above ... if you use an older version of unity .. then use LUT files to achieve the same result (you will just do the colors corrections in Photoshop instead)

I often get this question , and my answer is always the same ... it is not about a special tool or asset, or about a special lightning ... it is all about the choices of colors at creation time + colors corrections at post FX time.
We are dealing with millions potential colors to choose from .. so when you manage to get a right combo of colors, then the picture just look good .. change one color on the mix, and you are back to "damn, why does it looks so bad ?".

And it is not just the textures colors we are talking about ... it is the color of the light, the color of the fog, the color of the skybox, etc ...

 

But in the pics you posted, you didnt use Cinematic Suite... you just used Gaia, Bloom, and AllSky. Still the view looks wonderful. I just wanted to know how can i achieve the same!

 

there was no cinematic suite at that time .. so the technique was exactly the same, just a lot more painful .. i was using the standard effects color correction tool , stacking 4 or 5 of them at once on a camera, adjusting slowly. the colors .. but it was very time consumming, and it lacked precision .. at the end i started to use LUT files as mentionned above.

trust me, the Cinematic suite is what you are after .. and it is free !

 

I googled it but The Cinema Suite, its 125$ and it offers camera tools!

You are saying that you achieved that feeling using color correction, then why not to use Amplify Color! It offers a lot of stuff and the comments are great!

Please help me in this aspect because I really need this for my games!

 

here you go

to illustrate :

Cinematic suite Off



Cinematic suite On

 

What's the performance difference with the effects on and off?

 

i pretty much don't see any differences on a desktop computer

 

Between Gaia and Map Magic, which do you prefer more?

 

Map Magic .. because of the real time visual feedback and the liberty of creation that graphs/nodes construction offers .. being on the artistic side of things, this is invaluable to me.

But you need to know what you are doing with MapMagic, if you have no clues what a perlin noise or a voronoi cell are .. then you probably won't have a good time.
If you are new to Unity, terrain making, or art in general ... Gaia will get you up and running in a very lush environment in less than 10 mns, and you will feel very good about it.

the truth is, i love both .. but i can't seem to get right the spawning system in Gaia, at least when i try to build a world from scratch with my own ressources .. so i am a bit stuck there.
MapMagic has been only happiness so far .. but a bit of experience is required.

 

Hey sarum!

Your generated worlds in the first pics, where is a river too, were also made with this cinematic suite? Because there, There is such a nice feeling and the lighting is pretty good!

Thanks!

 

Landscape Builder can build procedural worlds in the Editor or via runtime scripts. If you have specific requirements head over to our beta forum as we add new features weekly. Don't be afraid to leave feature requests.

 

more procedural modelling

Toolbox : Archimatix beta , Cinematic suite








let's now try to procedurally spawn this little procedural tower on a procedural landscape, to see what happens ...

Toolbox : Map Magic , SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Cinematic suite , Archimatix beta

 

Love the wooden pier substructure under the towers. Very dreamy to see the tower out on the water's edge. Once Archimatix has Replicators, you will be able to procedurally place tower variations of the landscape.

 

" tower variations" as size/height variations or structures/construction variations ?

 

Yes - height, radius, cell count, floor count... any parameter that the structure has will be procedurally variable through any spawner system. For example, this repeating parametric object in this image is a multistory building. If yo adjust its height, you get more floors. Feeding this object into a Grid with a Jitter in Height won't just scale it or extrude it to different heights, but will actually spawn an instance of the building with its height parameter set for that location, allowing the FloorRepeater to respond to this height.

In this example in Archimatix, I dragged the height handle, hit the "Stamp" button, move the AXModel to the next location, changed the height and hit "Stamp", and repeated several times. When Replicator nodes are working, this will be procedural instead of manual.

 

cool

 

Wow you guys have some incredible art here, I just dropped about 10 likes. Keep up the good work.

 

i have never been mass liked before .. i feel a bit dizzy

 

The PlanRepeater node in Archimatix is nearing completion. PlanRepeater uses lengths of Shapes between break angles to distribute the objects it is repeating. The corners represented by breaking vertices can also extend Inset PlanSweeps that are generated automatically if a section Shape is provided. In this example, the PlanRepeater has been fed into a FloorRepeater. The height of the PlanSweep for the roof has been linked to the height of the FloorRepeater so you can drag the roof up and down to reconfigure the height of the building and the number of floors.



The node graph shows how all the pieces have been made and linked in Archimatix, allowing for lots of flexibility while stamping out instances of this parametric model.

 

@roryo the plan repeater node looks really promising ... i am very impatient to beta test it

 

procedural dungeon

teaser

Toolbox : Dungen, Multistory Dungeons, SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens , Cinematic suite

 

Amazing how there is no asset popping.

 

indeed

 

Maybe we're thinking of different things, but there's a TON of asset popping. Watch the trees. But if you're talking about render distance then yes, they stated they maxed out render distance.

 

Hi. The top result in Google for "Cinematic suite" is this page! There's nothing on the asset store matching that name and close matches seem to be unrelated.

Can anyone provide a link?

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/51515

Unity just released this too :
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/83912

 

Here is the night version of our procedural city.

 

Since this was bumped, I'll reply to an old post.

How are you getting models like this? Did you make the model yourself? Did it come with one of the assets? If so, is it a pre-built model or some kind of modular type of thing?

Additionally, have you tried TerrainComposer at all? I've found it to be pretty powerful for procedural generation of terrain. I'm planning to use it for a game that generates procedural terrain at runtime.