Experiments and Musings

I’m still working on the various release-related stuff for 4066. There’s lots of small fixes and improvements for the website, as well as hopefully sending out a newsletter soon. If you don’t even remember when the last time you received one was, thats because it was a long time ago 😛 Desperately trying to do better on comms.

An experiment

Onwards. I had a few hours free tonight and decided to play with an idea. As a quick refresh, VDMs let you have all kinds of 3D overhangs, but topologically you can’t have any holes. It’s like a sheet of stretchy paper – you can bend and distort it into all kinds of interesting ways, but at the end of the day its a connected sheet.

For terrain that’s a pretty good trade! Even extremely detailed terrain can be essentially fully captured in all its 3D complexity. If you haven’t played with it yet in Dragontail, you should.

The notable exception is something that almost everyone wants to make at some point though: Arches. This is an experiment to be able to create those too with VDMs.

Somewhat surprisingly, almost all the capabilities needed to experiment with this are already present in Dragontail! The key is the Meshify device, which takes both a VDM and a mask — that lets you cut away parts of the sheet you don’t want to keep.

Here’s my experiment:

I started out with this shape. Essentially, it’s a gaussian bump heightfield with two holes punched into the side, all the way through until they come out the other side:

The pink areas are the back of the other side extruding all the way through.

Then, just feed that to the meshify device with a mask that cuts away the backfacing sections and viola:

Add a couple layers of VDM noise and some thermal weathering and:

That’s really not too bad!

None of the detailing devices involved (noise, weathering) actually understand the surface masking, but its intriguing enough to think about for future actual use…