VelesPlugin

Veles, also known as Volos, is a major god of earth, waters, livestock, and the underworld in Slavic paganism. Wikipedia

DEMO

https://youtu.be/Cqm3NdZCoLA

Information

This plugin is an education project based on video GPU-Based Run-Time Procedural Placement in Horizon: Zero Dawn I tried to reproduce this cool part from video.

Education program

Layers system World Data

• I have a Paint Layer for custom drawing. Painted World Data
• As a mask I can use Weightmaps from landscape
• A World Data Layer is for generated specific maps (for example I tried to use Houdini to generate some mask in my test project)

Density map Here

• Texture and source type (layer or weightmap)
• A few scalar parameters for composing
• I think about how I can optimize it (texture array)
• Layer texture without mips (Horizon uses high mip for trees and lower for grass)
• Different sizes (Horizon 64px per block)

Patterns

• I tried 'Dither algorithm' and it's very interesting. But I didn't include it. Here
• I have basics algorithms (Grid, Random and Blue Noise, Random Diamond variation)
• I didn't fully understand what they do here with footprint. It's beautiful.
• I generate several wavefronts and use a pattern as stamp like here

Placement

• I use idx from wavefront for random, they used stencil? mask
• I decided to use 3 vector4 instead matrix, maybe in the future..

Unreal GPU Compute Shaders

• I used RDG (Render Dependency Graph) and didn't separate it
• They have production pipeline, more complex and with dependencies Here

Spawning system

• From readback I move data to Array of instances
• I use HISMC with Actors per tile. I don't support World Partition Actors, but mb in the future..

Solving collision?

• I didn't create 'solving collision' system from here

Known issues

• Heightfield Z location from texture isn't correct when we have slopes
• Don't use a normal vector from a landscape texture