*** FEATURES ***
• Node-based user interface easily shareable between TerraWorld users
• Creates detailed terrain surfaces using real-world elevation and satellite imagery
• Heightmap filters such as Erosion and Terrace to generate realistic terrain surfaces
• Outputs slope and flowmap masks from heightmap
• Analyzing satellite images using filters such as “Color Filter” and use generated masks to create terrain layers used for terrain texturing
• Outputs specific area features such as water, trees, grass and etc. from online landcover data and pass generated masks to “Mesh Generator” or “Scatter” nodes in order to create 3D models where needed and populate assets in scene.
• Customized terrain shader which adds high-end features such as DX11 Tessellation, Height and Colormap Blending, Procedural Snow and Stochastic Texturing for terrain rendering.
• Biome Templates which are pre-made graphs to cover various biome types in nature such as Forests, Grasslands, Deserts and Tundra environments.
• Customized Standard Shader which supports Procedural Snow, Wind, Double Sided Rendering and Height-based Tessellation features.
• Users can create new graphs or edit and customize existing ones to setup desired environment elements in scene.
• Day Night cycle with automatic dynamic lighting adoption through the entire scene
• Billboard Clouds Rendering with semi-volumetric representation
• Atmospheric Scattering to cover Volumetric Lighting and Aerial Perspective Fog
• Wind Simulation to support vertex animation in materials
• Horizon Fog to fill in the gaps at scene horizon level and blend world bounds with sky
• Procedural Snow coverage for the entire scene
• Customized Water Shader with flowmapping support on surface
• Compatible with Unity’s built-in Post Processing solution
• Scatter objects and GPU Instances based on user-defined or analyzed environment elements such as slope, color, biome type and etc. in the scene with built-in high performance rendering.
• Water area extraction from real-world landcover sources and automatic generation of lake and river surfaces.
• Generated copies of terrain surface at specific areas based on user-defined rules or analyzed environment elements such as slope, color, biome type and etc.
• Automatic Cache system to work in offline mode
• Different Scene View modes to take the editor camera to specific hot spots.
• Includes massive collection of hand-edited resources to start with creating desired landscapes.
• In-Editor terrain preview before world generation.
• No sign-up needed in external websites or sources
• No tokens from mapping providers are required
• Unlimited server requests for heightmap & imagery
• Accurate centimeter area selection
• Highest resolution global coverage
• Features ESRI’s updating community driven data source
• Compatible with Unity’s terrain system and any other 3rd party assets
• User-friendly & intuitive user interface
• Easy to learn with lots of
video & documentation resources
• Active support through emails and forum posts
• Professional community involving in high-end projects
The current system consists of 7 main sections in order to handle all settings for world creation. The whole settings can be saved into a preset file which is easily shareable between TerraWorld users.
- Area Selection
This is where users define the area for world generation through a user-friendly interactive 2D map window. You can also toggle on a 3D preview map in scene to get an overview of the final environment.
- Heightmap
This is the graph where users define heightmap and surface properties through various nodes of filters, masks and operators. The filters take input height data and process using realistic erosion, terrace and deformation filters and analyze surface to output slope, flow, curvature & aspect maps to be used by other nodes.
- Colormap
All operations of satellite imagery analysis and terrain texturing is being done through this graph. The system uses advanced image processing algorithms to create a realistic colormap by analyzing satellite image pixels and surface analysis along with blending of detail textures based on obtained landcover.
- Biomes
All environment elements which needs to be created or populated in the world can be handled through this graph. This graph includes specific biome extractors to detect landcover zones and use Scatter and MeshGen modules to place user-defined 3D models in scene and create procedural models where needed.
- Terrain Rendering
This is where you define the type of terrain material and its features based on target platform. The Modern Rendering feature in this section uses TerraWorld’s custom terrain shader which supports:
- DX11 Tessellation & Phong Smoothing
- Height Blending of detail textures for sharp looking texture blending
- Colormap Blending for far/close blending of created colormap (derived from satellite image) with detail textures from camera position
- Procedural Snow with full controls over strength, opacity and angle distribution
- Procedural Puddles to scatter puddles along flat areas of terrain
- Stochastic texturing to remove tiling artifacts due to high frequency details in textures
- Per layer Material Properties of Color, AO (Ambient Occlusion), Metallic & Smoothness.
- VFX
In this section we set all visual properties of the scene to define features such as day/night cycle, clouds rendering, atmospheric scattering, volumetric lighting and fog, season setup, real-time reflections and post processing.
- General Settings
This section handles core general settings of the TerraWorld system in order to toggle on/off specific features used in background operations and also UI.