Over that last month we’ve been improving the user interface and editing capabilities of our Cubiquity voxel terrain system. In our last video we demonstrated sculpting the shape of the terrain, and the video below shows how you can now paint materials onto the terrain as well.
As you can see, we’ve significantly improved the interface such that it is now quite similar to the one which comes with Unity’s built-in terrain. It offers many of the same features in terms of being able to select brush size and shape, and choosing from a variety of materials which can be painted onto the terrain. You get a similar marker on the terrain showing where operations will be applied and you can change texture settings such as scale and offset.
As always, you can get the latest version of the code from our BitBucket repository.
Overall we’ve very happy with the way this is coming together. At this point I think we’ve implemented most of the features which we want in place for the first release, and so we will now focus on tidying up the code and documenting the system. Then we’ll talk to those nice people at Unity about getting on the Asset Store 🙂
Hi David,
one suggestion: if you want to reduce repeated/tiled texture patterns on voxels, you can look on how we solved it in our voxel game (it’s open source)
https://github.com/KeenSoftwareHouse/Miner-Wars-2081
Basically, when calculating texture coordinates from XYZ, we just scale it to close distance or larger distance and then blend these two. Our pixel shaders are in that github archive.
Bye
Marek
Thanks Marek, I think that’s a nice idea. Actually I saw something similar once but I had forgotten about it: http://youtu.be/dEJtR_uy4zs?t=2m18s
I imagine it only works well for certain textures (rocks, etc) but I think we can make it toggleable per-material. Thanks for the tip 🙂
Hey this voxel library looks pretty cool, thanks for sharing!
On the project it states that Cubiquity can be used for free with a limited size, would you mind sharing what this size is? Also for larger volumes how high is the fee?
For smooth terrain it’s currently 128^3 and for cubic terrain it’s currently 256^3… but we are currently considering doing something different with the free version. The price of the full version is also a little unclear but I think we’ll launch at about $200 per seat and see how it sells. It’s really not fixed yet though.
Is the method ended up using for material blending a secret or can you tell me? Did you just end up splitting the meshes and blending along joins, as described in your Game Engine Gems article?
I just watched the video, and that’s one hell of a material system you’ve got there! Excellent work! How on EARTH do you get smooth, soft blending between materials like that? Does it rely on newer graphics card features like texture arrays?
Oh wait, is it as simple as using 4 different texture units? Because it looks to me like you’ve got it limited to 4 materials per terrain. Still, it looks really great, so I think it’s worth it! 😀
Yes, it using separate texture units. This does put a limit on the maximum number of textures but practically speaking I don’t think it’s a problem. I also sent you an email with a couple more details for the blending.
Awesome, thanks for that 😀 Great insight 🙂
Looks interesting, but can’t seems to make to run on OSX, do you have an installation/demo tutorial?
Hi Dan,
Unfortunately Cubiquity for Unity3D does not currently work with Mac OSX as it relies on a Windows native-code .dll. We really need to make this clearer as you are not the first person to be caught out. We hope to support other platforms in the coming months, once the Windows version is a bit more polished.