Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Procedural Landscape Update - Biome Generator

I'm creating a new tool for the landscape generator, surnamed the Biome Generator.

What it does is assign a biome or range of biomes to a selected landscape. (Or whatever is selected really.)

I haven't created the meshes for the trees, shrubs and grass yet, but all it does now is assign a floor material. (Assigns each face with the specified biomes floor or ground color, such as dirt, sand, moss, or swamp shrubs.)


Looks cool right?

Here's one with a much more realistic biome range. (Tundra to taiga)

The green is supposed to be a (plantless) taiga floor, while the grey is tundra dirt.

Now obviously I need to add meshes to represent plant life and snow for the tundra, and you probably noticed I didn't use actual ground textures, just basic solid colors. This is because this is considered low-poly artwork, and though I could use real textures, this is only a proof of concept, so shading each polygon a single solid color is a good start for me.

Now what is a biome?


A biome is a group or neighborhood of a specific range of plants and animals within a certain region, climate, or temperature.

The how the biome generator works is based off of this diagram:


In the generator, you input a range of temperature vs. a range of rainfall, and (Although those aren't the ONLY things that determine biome, I wanted to give developers some degree of imaginative freedom.) based on the combination of the two, it creates a range of biomes starting from the top of a landscape to the bottom. You can make it unrealistic or not.

It's still a work-in-progress, and I'll post the code and much better images when I DO make more progress, (Trees, shrubs, rocks, snow, etc...) but stay tuned!

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