Monday, June 27, 2016

Introducing Pollock

Pollock is the code-name for our new terrain generation system. Why Pollock? This system went rogue for a couple of days and started producing things that did not look like terrain and more like Jackson Pollock paintings:


It seems mad randomness at first, just like Pollock, but there is a lot of order in this chaos (and also what appeared to be a buffer overrun error somewhere in the code.)

Here are some images of the system when it behaves as expected:







The colors you see in these renders are not the final landscape colors. Each color identifies a different layer of more detailed material that will go there. These are placeholder materials Pollock is creating for you.

Pollock's main input is photographs, which you provide to suggest the geography of each biome. In case you want to create a full continent, Pollock will ask you some additional basic facts about elevation, temperature and wind direction.

In continents, you will get nice surprises like a desert appearing on one side of a mountain range:


While the other side of the same range is all made of fertile land:


This has happened due to all the moisture coming from the sea precipitating over one side and having only dry air go over the mountains.

It takes around five minutes to set this up from scratch. The system will so some pre-processing for a few minutes (usually less than five) and that's it. In less than 15 minutes you can complete the creation of an entire continent that spans over a dozen different biomes.

We are in the last stages of completion for this system. There are two main features missing: the addition of forests, rocks, etc. and plugging this with the lake generator to get inner lakes. Right now the system only does ocean.

This system will be included in the Voxel Farm 3 release.

8 comments:

  1. That's really cool!
    I'm really starting to get tempted to buy the Creator version (And I'm a cheap bastard who doesn't like spending money XD), this seems more and more interesting to just experiment and screw around with (As well as a very useful tool for developing large worlds and such)

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  2. My problem is I don't have money to spend, but I still want to buy Voxel Studio. Who needs to eat when you can sculpt the landscape of your dreams and pretend that you're on your way to becoming the next Gaudi or da Vinci.

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    1. The longer you wait, the more content and functionality there'll be (Once you buy it, you get a year of updates, after that you'd have to buy it again to get the new updates). So there's actually at least two reasons to wait until you've actually saved up a bit of money =).

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    2. I'd rather have fun and spend time building landscapes and structures, than wasting money on coffees, cigarettes, and alcohol. Everybody's got their priorities.

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  3. Nic eotp see someone who apreciates the underlying order found in pollock's paintings.

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  4. I am christmas excited right now !!! :D

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  5. I am still searching my jaw. Stunning.

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