Random experiments

Since the cat is now out of the bag in terms of VDM terrain, I figured I’d share a quick post with a few more examples as I work on getting things ready for the dev release!

Here’s a test world I’m currently working on to resolve some issues with the VDM Repair device. One neat discovery is that VDMs make it really easy to create slabby/folded/layered terrain, because just like the earth itself, you can just push the raw rock structure as you want:

When you start displacing the surface in any direction, it’s inevitable that you’ll introduce folds and self-intersections to the surface. Sometimes thats OK, but usually you will want to correct it so that the surface doesn’t clip through itself, which is what the Repair device does.

Here is the “raw” form of that same world after the first VDM displacement is applied, but before the repair and erosion are applied:

You can see that I’ve turned on backface display to show where the terrain is poking through itself. Note that the VDM Noise device actually takes quite a lot of care to not cause this on its own — this is set to deliberately introduce those errors.

A random gallery

Here’s a random collection of other example test files showing off some of the possibilities. These are not intended as polished scenes or anything, just some experiments.

That one is kind of fun because I was experimenting with adding stalactites to areas that are downward-facing to see how it worked (pretty well!)

This one is showing the coexistance of water with VDM terrain:

And this one, the updated Snow device, showing the modifications of the snow model for vdm. That probably deserves its own post at some point, because it has some really cool upgrades including better support for wind-driven snow — but that’s a later post.

Finally, a modified Heightfield based scene, with some cliff displacements added and snow layered on top:

Finally, these last screenshots are the very first saved outputs from the branch where I started experimenting with VDMs for terrain, all the way back in 2018(!):

I considered it a very promising experiment at the time, but there were a million and one other tasks that needed doing, including the LTE port of WM off of the ancient old win32 framework, And so VDM terrain was punted.. until now.

I’m hoping for a dev release in the next few weeks – There are plenty of things that are not at final state yet, but the whole point of a dev preview is to get early access to not-quite-finished features! Examples, docs, and more will then get fleshed out concurrent with the devices reaching final state.

Stephen