Thursday 6 August 2015

River Editing with Flood Placement

In the past I have found it difficult to create accurate looking rivers.  Partially this is because I was using semi circle segments for curves with no editable control points, so recently I have implemented rivers by using Bezier Curves. 

Still, it can be difficult to place control points at decreasing elevations, to ensure that the river flows down and that it does not rise above the ground.  I implemented a plane which effectively shows what terrain is down hill from the previous point and if the current control point is above the previous point. 

Adding this simple feature makes placing rivers much easier as the Flood Grid shows you the only possible regions which additional control points can be placed.



This video shows the interface for placing rivers with Flood Placement enabled.  The grid moves with the selector (3d cursor) and appears orange if the elevation of the current position is higher than the previous point in the river.  The end of this video shows the map loaded into a separate program which loads the features of the saved file.


Advanced Forest Generation with Map Editor

Over the past 5 years I have worked intermittently on a custom map editor for potential use in designing scenes for animations and environments for video games.

This past year I have done some major work refactoring the code for this editor and adding control forms for each layer to give a wide range of options and processes for creation.


The forest Layer of this editor now contains components to select forest textures from a library by forest regions (such as Boreal Forest, Dry Rocky Mountains, Coast Mountains)  Each texture set contains various textures containing different tree mixes at various densities.  With this control it allows for more accurate representational forest creation of various regions.


The Forest Editor also contains controls for procedural generation based on terrain elevation and slope aspect.  (These are generally the main factors determining forest types)


There are still controls for specific texture assignments, forest growth value modification and texture  randomization to allow for detailed editing of forests for the scene. 


Bellow is a video demonstrating most of the forest editing controls I have implemented.  First is using the detailed texture controls for editing terrain and forest textures, as well as the texture selector.  Second this video shows procedural forest generation and its functionality by modifying various parameters.