Voxeland - Voxel Terrain Tool

Voxeland 5 is in beta test stage now, and according to the number of bugs found in lately it's nearly a release candidate. Here you can track Voxeland issues, when all of them will be resolved then the release will be the matter of days.

The terrain is infinite in X and Z directions and height, but you cannot go down below the zero level in Y axis.

 

cool!
Been examining all the voxel solutions for unity, this one looks like the best going.
I spent the longest time just 'playing' with the web demo than any other asset demo here, I'm impressed.
I plan on getting M.M. with it too.

 

so like 1 week then to release or 1 month? I cant wait to use Voxeland with map magic, just bought map magic a week ago and it is awesome.

 

So? How are you handling access to the beta for users?
...Just got mine yesterday!

Or maybe I'll just wait, I have a number of other things in my project I am working on also. Sounds close anyway.

 

What is the extra resources when using Voxeland generator with MM and when you are not? like 10% more or like 50% more?

 

Unfortunately there's a limitation for the number of users on my Bitbucket plan. I cannot add everyone who sign a form to Bitbucket repository, but just 50 of you. Sorry folks
I try to invite most active users from forums, and those who got both Voxeland and MapMagic so they can test the integration. And I'm going to expunge users who showed no activity during all of the test period soon to give others a chance to take part.

dlevel, are you talking about overhead? Both MapMagic and Voxeland produce almost none overhead when idle or calculating, but terrain or collider apply frames can take more than 15 ms since it can be done only in main thread.

 

Maybe you could try GitLab, free, unlimited users and private projects, awesome tools including a issue tracker with kanban board and 10 gigs of space per project. https://about.gitlab.com/

 

First of all:
The work you have done is really amazing. I'm testing it and I will continue to follow its developments passionately. Compliments.


But, honestly, I have some doubts / suggestions to give.


A) LOSSES
The texture panel doesn't have the relief/ height maps ... why aren't they directly on the panel ?? As user, I would like to set the material to be used completely ... not partially.

B) BRUSH ASSETS
It would be very useful to have several brushes to model in addition to the cube and the sphere. ex:
- hilly (a brush to create soft lines);
- mountain (to quickly build peaks);
- cylinder (to create cylindrical holes - galleries)

It would also be useful to change the size (x, y, z) of the brush (at least of the cube! and not only max 6 size...)

Only this could increase the speed of map creation!


C) MATERIAL ASSETS
It would be useful, instead of using the textures as it is now, to have in the panel directly the material (maybe matched to substance and already with the height/parallax map) with its values.

D) PAINTING PRO
It would be helpful to have more control over the splat / blanding of the material ... maybe with some option on how it does the blanding.

E) RANDOMIZED ELEMENTS
Create a group of element (ex. group "little grass" > grass 1, grass 2, grass 3) whit random.


These are only suggestions ... but I'll pay three times the current cost, if you'll do them!

 

@Mr_Albert - Almost all those things are outside the scope of what Voxeland is intended to do. The good news, however, is that you will soon be able to do all those things and more for less than three times the price. @Wright is working on new versions of both Voxeland, as well as his MapMagic terrain generation tool. Not only will both be faster and more powerful, but they will be able to integrate with each other, so that you can easily (and procedurally) create hills and mountains and even do some advanced terrain texturing, and then also adjust and dig (and smooth) with the power of Voxeland.

For really advanced terrain texturing that makes use of heightmaps and does parallax occlusion mapping or even tessellation, you would want to look into Relief Terrain Pack or Megasplat. The current versions of MapMagic and Voxeland both can work with RTP, and the results are pretty amazing. The new version of MapMagic that's in development will also have Megasplat integration. MapMagic already does some pretty advanced stuff with random elements/objects such as grasses and trees, you can even create complete biomes (groups of different objects), though as a novice MM user I don't have enough experience to say how easy it is to create.

As for Voxeland brush size, if you check back a few pages, I had asked about a larger max brush size in a future version, and Wright posted some code tweaks to allow that in the current version of Voxeland. The upcoming Voxeland5 will allow you to define your own max brush size easily in settings.

I'm really looking forward to the integration. Wright had posted a video demo, I'll link it below as I had his youtube channel open in another browser tab and think it's a great little teaser:

 

MakeGames2, thanks, I will give GitLab a spin.

Mr_Albert, thanks for your suggestions. I'll try to answer some of your questions:

The default voxeland shader does not support displacement or height blending, it does not need any heightmaps. If you are using RTP then you should assign textures with the ReliefTerrain component.

I've made a stamp brush for Voxeland 5, with it's help you can set any brush shape.

Sounds logical, but block types have other information than just a material parameters (like the grass value). Voxeland 5 will use texture arrays, so there will be no way to assign texture to material directly anyways.

 

Hi @Wright
RTP has many options and does not fit perfectly. I would say..."Do anything but do it well"

but... amplify shader compatibilty? is it good idea?

( I repeat: they are only suggestions and ideas, it's just for talk, compliments for the work done! )

for all... thank you!

 

I think mostly towards MegaSplat. It allows to display all of the block types Voxeland has - 256. It has height blending and displacement. And I've got some experience integrating it in MapMagic. So I think it fits perfectly to Voxeland.
PS it's still just an idea, it will not be implemented in 5.0

 

@Wright, hi, will voxelland 5 have any kind of lod for baked terrains?

 

Ok so I m trying the beta version of voxeland among with MapMagic beta, i followed the short tutorial video and everything works fine, my question now is how to actualy implement it on an infinite terrain with raw maps etc. ? I m trying to implement an already mapmagic created world to voxel terrain

 

@Wright, i want to get a completely finished product for use in games, but all voxel assets (including you Voxeland) lead to the emergence of flying "islands" and parts of terrain. I would not want a player to see this in the final game.
Are you going to add fall physics to the voxels to avoid the flying voxels? This is not enough for all voxel assets. The physics of the fall, I had seen in the game 7 Days To Die, and it looks great! Are you planning this?

 

MarcusGod, Voxeland has two levels of detail: one for close-up display, and one for mid-range terrain. Furthermore there is a horizon in a distance that is actually a heightmap terrain, it does not work with baked terrains. But the other two will do in v5 do - you can make the static Voxeland terrain switch lods without actually generating new chunks.

dlevel, if you have MapMagic graph that works in infinite mode (but I guess it's semi-infinite mode since you are using Raw Input) then you can make it work with Infinite Voxeland just with replacing standard output generators with the Voxeland ones. Or is there any issue with the infinite mode?

Alexbroz, Voxeland is not a complete game, it's just a terrain engine. It does not have any collision calculations or something, you will have deal with them yourself. Happiliy Unity has a phisics engine, so you can use it to make meshes fall. And since v5 you can have several Voxeland objects in scene, you can detach some parts of the terrain in a separate mesh and make them fall. But be prepared that it's not an easy task and will require some scripting knowledge - especially to determine the parts of the terrain that are not bound to the ground - i.e. floating islands with more than single block size.

 

Thank you for your reply, and I might be stupid but I didnt quite get it what do you mean, I would beg for a small tutorial for this, having a made map with MapMagic (for example your demo MapMagic map), semi-infinite with height-maps as you said, and make it work with Voxeland infinite.

 

I'd like to mention that I've just submitted new Voxeland version for Unity review, so you can expect it shortly in AS. Regarding this I've got an announcment:

@All of the Beta testers:

I'd like to congratulate you with the end of MM 1.8/ Voxeland 5.00 Beta test and releasing of MM in Asset Store (while Voxeland is still pending a review). Thanks for all of your feedback!

This does not means that the beta test is over. I'm constantly changing and improving my assets, so if you want to get the latest MM/Voxeland versions with quicker bug fixing you will find the next information useful: For the next betas I'm going to use GitLab instead of Bitbucket. You can find repositories here: Voxeland, MapMagic, PluginTools.

All of the further commits will be done here, Bitbucket repositories are no longer supported.

Issues and wiki pages moved to GitLab too, so make sure you are reporting your issue to GitLab.

@All:

Note that Issues and Wiki pages could be accessed publicly.

These pages could be read without even logging to GitLab. To report an issue without logging-in use email link at the bottom of the issues page. I will appreciate if you will report issues here rather than my email.

I will store the documentation on wiki shortly.

If you'd like to take part in testing of new asset versions or for some reason have not got an access to the new repository feel free to submit (or re-submit) this form.

dlevel, I'll think about creating some sort of tutorial

 

This asset is suitable for creating a terrane for online games?

 

I've been messing with Voxeland 5, I'm trying to extend the range of the horizon mesh. I've tried scaling the horizon mesh and that doesn't work right, everything just gets distorted.

So to fix this I've been trying to alter the way horizon meshes are generated by making it so instead of just 1 horizon mesh is created, there will be the one that is usually generated and then 8 other horizon meshes generated that surround the main horizon mesh.

How can i change the height map generated for a particular horizon mesh based on its position, I've got it to generate the horizon mesh's but they all have the same height map?

 

Wright,

So far I am thoroughly enjoying this package. Caves are a pretty solid part of the eventual project model, so having the functionality to edit them in first-person mode is a very welcome aspect. Furthermore, being able to generate multiple terrain meshes with different chunks (in effect creating "biomes") is excellent.

With that said, I'm having a key issue with the script editor. The grass tooltip notes that you can set different grass "types" to each chunk, but I'm only able to get one working at a time. The only thing that changes is the assigned tint of the specific block type. The mesh and material remain the same. I'm able to create multiple grass entities, but only one is assigned at any given time, no matter how many grass entities I actually create. Perhaps I am missing an assign-to-block functionality somewhere?

Another thing I've noticed is that the generator will not spawn my prefabs, but they spawn perfectly if I use the brush manually. Why would that be?

Although I am working with a very limited budget, I must say that this asset has been worth each red cent I've invested in it. I look forward to future iterations!

EDIT: Is there also no way to set a navmash on the generated terrain? Each time I try with a Navigation Static tag, I get some small, jagged areas and that's about it. I'm still very excited about this asset, but it slowly dwindles as I can't get the basic functions to work, some of which it states right in the documentation it can do (like prefab generation).

 

Hello can I transform the generated terrain in low poly terrain ?

 

I've requested a feature to create a single low poly output for the purpose of using a Tessellation shader but perhaps the more reasons for low poly creation may inspire Denis to make it happen.

Currently if you bake your terrains you should have chunks in low poly version and higher poly version.. you may simply only need to delete the higher poly files but I don't know if there is an LOD script that may look for/require both files.. so there maybe errors if you remove one. I hope in the future we can have the option to generate a single resolution we need.
@Wright

 

Looks like 5.0 is now available. Can't wait to check it out.

 

Voxeland 5 has been released (oddly enough I have not got the email notification about it). It brings these changes:

- New multithreaded engine
- MapMagic compatibility. MapMagic can generate all types of terrains for Voxeland, with caves and overhangs
- New 24-channel (DX11) height-blended triplanar surface shader
- New generate engine (works in a separate thread too)
- Blob brush mode
- Stamp brush mode
- Brush continious painting (sculpts terrain while mouse is pressed)
- Brush modes assignable to ctrl, shift, alt modes in editor
- Relax iterations and values could be changed - from cubical terrain to extra smooth one
- Terrain Static mode - analog of baked terain that could be changed in editor
- New highlight shader and algorithm, it now displays a full block with higher transparency

nemesiswes, I've created an issue for that.

Gunsrequiem, Isn't "Soil Types Opacity" in generator is what you are looking for? Theoretically the editor should allow placing of any grass type on any block - if user explicitly does so. Block-grass type is relevant while generating the land, to prevent placing improper grass on the terrain.
The same thing with the objects - make sure you have "Soil Types Opacity" set to 1 on a desired soil type to scatter objects here.
And don't forget to turn Scatter's checkbox on to enable it. I've just checked that the Scatter generator should work, so maybe it's something wrong with it's settings.

There are still some roughnesses to be polished, Voxeland 5 is the second day in the wide access. Pity they were not found during the beta test, but I'm going to fix them real soon. If you find some more feel free to append the issues list. You do not have to be registered at GitLab, there is a link "Send via email" at the bottom of the issues list.

Ascensi, Voxeland generates hipoly meshes internally. I can make it output only their low poly versions, but it will not give a significant performance boost. But yep, it will get rid of unused meshes.

 

@Wright thank you for the updates!

 

Hooray and congrats on the release! I just got my notification email a little while ago, and am downloading & installing the release version today.

 

D'oh... after downloading and installing the 5.0 release, I get three hard stop errors in the console...

I'm on a Mac running Unity 5.6.1p1 with MapMagic 1.8

Assets/Voxeland/Editor/VoxelandEditor.cs(616,31): error CS0117: `MapMagic.VoxelandOutput' does not contain a definition for `voxeland'
Assets/Voxeland/Editor/VoxelandEditor.cs(617,36): error CS0117: `MapMagic.VoxelandGrassOutput' does not contain a definition for `voxeland'
Assets/Voxeland/Editor/VoxelandEditor.cs(618,38): error CS0117: `MapMagic.VoxelandObjectsOutput' does not contain a definition for `voxeland'

Restarting Unity, and then deleting both and re-installing both does not clear the error. I'll try a new/empty project in a little while.

 

Thank you! I will have to edit some things to see if I can get it working. I'm sorry if I came off as pretentious or annoyed--that wasn't my intention. This is clearly an amazing asset, and I'm sure a ton of hard work went into it. I will definitely be sticking around and continuing to work with your assets. You are an incredible artist!

EDIT: By the way, the issues I were having were with the old editor. This new editor in version 5 is very streamlined and easier to use. Nice work!

 

had the same problem and what i did is deleting everything, went to a new scene, imported mapmagic, went to my main scene and my map worked fine, then imported voxeland and i saw the info that voxeland 5 support enabled and no error from that point

 

I've done some further testing on a Mac running Unity 5.6.1p1. In a new project, if all I do is install Voxeland5, it works (and is awesome). Trying to load the demo scene, however, causes Unity to hang and requires force quitting.

After restarting Unity, if I just go back to using Voxeland without attempting to use that demo scene, everything is fine.

Next, I installed MapMagic 1.8... and everything works.

Perhaps the errors I saw above in the other project were because I had previous versions or builds of MMWG and Voxeland in it at one time?

Aside from fixing the demo scene, one thing I would like to request is that perhaps you consider including an additional demo file... a MapMagic graph for Voxeland5, so that users who have both assets can see an example of how to use these two great tools together.

 

In Voxeland 5, I am not sure how to change the size of a Voxeland Static terrain object. Can I change this setting? Also, I'm not sure how to adjust the tiling of the textures on the land blocks. Is there an updated documentation page or wiki?

 

One other question about version 5. I haven't been able to figure out how to start with a flat plane surface. I'm using Voxeland Static, and I tried changing to Planar in the Generator settings, but it didn't seem to change anything. I still see Seed and Height settings when I pick Planar, but changing them also didn't seem to do anything.

 

@hoodoo One way you can make a flat terrain is by using a generator type of 'Noise' and changing the curve to a straight line.

 

Can somebody explain how "static" terrain works, and what difderences it have against "Dynamic limited". When using static terrain the Lod always stays the same, and terrain after lod level, not enabeles colliders when character are in area. It should work this way, or i catch a bug?

 

i can't upload Voxeland because i'm on Unity5.3.7 and my project not working on unity highter...

 

Gunsrequiem, it's okay, you were not more pretentious or annoyed than any customer facing some problem with an asset. And thanks for the compliments to the v5!

I've opened an issue (#67). As a workaround you can switch Playmode mode to infinite, click "Advanced", sett terrain size, and switch mode back to static.

hoodoo, I've opened an issue (#66) about flat terrain generate bug.As a workarounf you can try the solution suggested by WoodenDragon

MarkusGod, once static terrain chunks are generated, they are not destroyed and not re-generated (unless you change them). Dynamic terrain chunks are destroyed when the camera goes away from them and generated again when the camera returns. Use dynamic mode for big (or infinite) terrains that could not be generated all at once because of performance or memory reasons.

sebou42240, the minimum Unity version that Voxeland is compatible with is 5.4.5. You can try downloading beta, but you should use it at your own risk.

 

Thanks @WoodenDragon and @Wright - setting the noise curve works perfectly.

 

Denis,

I hope nothing below or in my bug post on gitlabs are construed as negative feedback or somehow makes your products looks bad, as I truly love both MapMagic and Voxeland. They're both stellar assets in their own right, but the integration of the two has a masterpiece in the making written all over it, they just require a bit of fine tuning now.

With that being said, I apologize for the influx of bugs and questions I have been finding lately. I'm just trying to learn what I can and do my part in helping to test and grow the products.

Anyways, I have a few questions regarding grass in voxeland 5:

• Grass
  • From what I can tell, grass is no longer tied to a 'Land Block texture', you can now literally paint grass on any Land Block and it will be displayed. In Voxeland 4, grass was only displayed on Land Blocks that were designated for allowing grass. Is this correct, or am I missing something?
    • Due to this change, is there a way to keep grass from being painted onto certain Land Block Textures? For instance, if I had mud texture blocks surrounding a single rock texture block, and I only wanted grass to grow on the mud texture blocks, how would I then keep grass from being painted onto the rock texture blocks (other than being very very careful)? This was achieved easily in Voxeland 4, as grass would only grow on designated block textures.
  • It appears that once grass has been painted on a block, the grass will follow the block height regardless of whether you dig or add to that block. So if I plant grass on a block, then dig down several blocks deeps, I will have grass at the bottom of my hole. Is this the intended behavior?
  • When using the MapMagic editor with Voxeland, the 'Force Generate All' button does not clear any grass from the terrain. Is this the intended behavior or a bug?
    • It also appears that Object blocks are not removed using the 'Force Generate All' button. Once again, is this the intended behavior or a bug?
  • What do the Height, Width, Elevation, Incline, and Random setting options do for grass? I don't see any differences when I adjust these settings...

I appreciate all the hard work you have been putting in!

 

Hi Great asset. Just wondering if V5 can produce gentle slopes as all the video and images currently shows only 45 degree slopes.

 

Hey, Wright!

Thought you might want to check out what the power of your asset has allowed me to do so far--in essence, I am using it to create an intricate, static world first. The single-player mode will be a story-based, non-voxel-editing campaign with the static world (albeit a very large one). It will implement vehicles, destructible buildings in a modulated building system, survival elements, intricate combat AI, and so forth. Furthermore, I'm hoping to include a "Sandbox" mode where the players can actually utilize the infinite generation and voxel editing to have fun, without the worry of too many enemies and such.

In the version that is displayed in the video, I have integrated a dynamic day/night and weather system with its own lighting and particle effects. It looks gorgeous against the Voxeland terrain!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I have a new issue cropping up--whenever I attempt to paint with the land block brush, I get this error:

"
NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
Voxeland5.Highlight.AddVoxelandFace (CoordDir coord, Voxeland5.Chunk chunk, Single opacity) (at Assets/Voxeland/Main/Highlight.cs:65) . . . .
"

It seems that this line of code is the issue:

"
Mesh chunkMesh = chunk.hiMesh;
"

For some reason, it doesn't like the "Chunk/chunk" method and wants to rename it.

Figured it out--it calls this error whenever parts of the brush highlight float off of the Voxeland terrain and into null space. Still having the issue with the land blocks, though (see below).

Also, whenever I try to paint with a fifth land block type (or any iteration after) it creates black areas. Is this because only four are allowed on one Voxeland entity?

 

@Gunsrequiem - I reported this issue a couple days ago (gitlabs - Issue 63). Wright is looking into this and will hopefully have it sorted out soon. BTW, great looking game you have so far!

 

WoodenDragon, there is no way reporting bugs on GitLab can make Voxeland look bad or something. Your feedback is very valuable, don't hesitate to post further issues here, and thanks for your bug reports!

Yes, in V5 the grass can grow on any block type, now it does not tied to the block data. I think that preventing a grass at certain block types would be handy, but it should be an editor feature that could be switched off (I think some sort of a brush toggle). This will make possible to paint grass on some cliff blocks if you'd really like to.

As far as I remember V4 grass behaved the same way (and so does standard Unity terrain btw). There is no such thing like "Grass Block" like in ole Minecraft (I'm not sure how it is done now), grass map is 2-dimensional, the grass data will be kept on terrain change.

MapMagic should remove all the terrain, grass and objects data if you have Voxeland, Voxeland Grass and Voxeland Objects outputs respectfully. If your graph does not contain Voxeland Objects Output then all the objects on the terrain will be untouched - and the same thing with grass and the land itself - so you can use MapMagic to generate only objects, for instance.

Oops, it's not yet implemented - it should not be exposed in the release - so I'm hiding that away

whatbus2000, you can increase the number of relax iterations - this will make your terrain almost smooth, so it will be hard to recognize the block data - it's up to you do decide whether it's good or bad.

Standard smoothing (2 relax iterations):


10 Relax iterations:


Gunsrequiem, great video! Fell free to share more!

Yep, fixed. I plan to submit all of the fixes on Monday. Right now fixes are available to all of the beta testers.

 

Thanks for the support, mates!

 

Why is it when I change the height parameter to something like 512 or higher, I start to get spikes in the terrain? I've adjusted the noise thinking that was the problem but I just cant seem to get rid of all the spikes? I'm starting to think its the mesh itself because the same thing happens when using Map Magic to generate terrain too.

 

I think a brush toggle would be a great idea!

@Wright - I can't for the life of me figure out how to generate objects using the Voxeland Objects Output in the MapMagic editor. I've tried everything I can think of... I'm sure I'm doing something stupid, but if you could show a quick picture on how a simple object would be generated in the editor, it would be greatly appreciated!

 

Unity 5.6 + V5
Demo scene is v4 under construction? Left click works as expected (removing)

• M click is not adding.
• ~ - 5 also not doing anything

The scene itself looks great!

 

hello, how to integrate water in voxeland like minecraft ?

 

I just got this yesterday and it's so fun! Also picked up Erosion Brush. (demo scene in Play mode is still not working for me, but Edit mode does.)
Is it all procedural, there a way to have Voxeland Terrain conform to a specific HeightMap first and then sculpt? I have a HeightMap created from WorldMachine exactly the shape I like, but now I want to dig tunnels in it.