Snow, Biomes

Last week's video was about adding variety to foliage.

Here are three new videos that show something similar but at a larger scale. The first two show transitions from snowy terrain to green terrain. The last one goes from green to some kind of rocky desert.








Do not pay too much attention to the sound, you will hear chipping birds no matter if it is snow or desert.

I did some improvement on the LOD switches. They are still happening pretty much on your face, but in general should be smaller.

Canyon City Teaser

In the past few days I have been writing a grammar for a massive structure. It is some sort of water collector for desert areas. It is so big that there are buildings on top of it and acts as the center of a small, parasitic city.

I did a couple of concept sketches for it. This was painted with my fingertips on an iPad (using the Paper app). Don't expect too much detail here:

The grammars for this structure are not difficult, but there are a lot of special cases. Since it is taking so long, I thought it would be nice to post some partial progress.

Here is a preview of what I have so far. The screenshots are taken straight from Voxel Studio.

This is a teaser so I won't be showing much. You cannot fully appreciate the scale here, but this thing is so large it will have an entire forest under the main dome. The towers, which are for cooling, are hundreds of meters high.

I am building this so I can finally show all elements of the procedural world coming together.

The desert, one last screenshot and video

I took this one last weekend. The location seemed nice to me.

Here is a short walk over the same area:

 

There are a few issues in this video. Some of the LOD switches are too visible. There are some noticeable discontinuities in the lighting that show in some distant cells. I'm working on fixing these issues, hopefully you can see past them.

Another desert video

Here is another video taken from the same desert.

 

You don't see far into the horizon because I only rendered an area of 2km by 2km. Also this particular walk happens on the top of massive mountains. I will capture one last video from the mountain base over the weekend.

Through the desert

Over the last few weekends I rewrote some of my 3D layers. I was bothered by the synthetic look of the Perlin and Worley functions I was using. It was not only that, it was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain different looks out of these functions.

The new functions are a lot simpler to use, they use real samples from nature. Here is one screenshot:

Some of these large rock formations would be a real headache if you only had generic noises. There are still a couple of Worley layers in there, actually those produce the features I like less about this terrain. I did not have enough time to replace them.


Here is a video:

   

Both video and image were captured from Sputnik, so please disregard the texturing. The mesh resolution is intentionally low. What you see is streamed over HTTP, bandwidth never goes over 400K/sec.

Desert

Here is another screenshot. This is some sort of desertic terrain.

I guess this one could be used to recreate the Grand Canyon or something like that. It has a lot of horizontal layering. Rocks appear broken down mostly by the flowing of air. Sand accumulates at the bottom.

I found that a ridged multifractal noise is very good for sand dunes and even the smaller waves sand tends to form.