Check out my latest landscape painting tests. Still have to add volumetrics (volume fog, water) and shadows.

Entire landscape painter was buily using HLSL from scratch in 3 days or so.

I paint a height map using a shader (height, flatten, smooth, sharpen, jitter). Each brush is a different shader. The jitter brush uses 4 octave perlin noise for example and the sharpen and smooth tools use a 49 tap filter kernel.

The height map is converted to a normal map and everything is rendered using a modified version of the ocean shader (vertex texture displacement).

I can add 4 types of soil colors and each soil type has a normal map. I can expand this to 5 soil types. (by normalizing the weights and storing only 4 weights. The 5th weight is simply 1-all other weights).

The sky is a physics based simulation of the sky color and a similar routine is used for the sun color and fog color. We also have a very good vegitation system now which allows us to fill the landscape with forests of more than 100 tree and plant spiecies. Up next is the water and shadows and then I'll try to get some plants, trees and grass on the landscape.

.. and here you see the effect of moving the sun direction.

Looks very nice. I remember a shaderX article from a RTS game maker. In the article they describe a way to create overhangs. (Basically by storing normals instead of heights.) Might be a nice addition for later.

Hi, Remko. Looks impressive!!
(I sent you a PM)

overhangs are easy.. all I need to do is save a 3D height field instead of a 1D height field. One might question though if this is usefull. painting will become difficult and performance and memory requirements will increase. 

Are we going to be able to import landscapes into this system? Maybe some kind of DEM file or similar? That would make it quite useful in visualization projects.

It looks very nice

nice nice nice. I ask every time for try an exe. Is it possible this time or we had to wait future.?
Thanks

overhangs are easy.. all I need to do is save a 3D height field instead of a 1D height field. One might question though if this is usefull. painting will become difficult and performance and memory requirements will increase. 

You're absolutely right. It can be an option, but you would normally have it turned off for performance reasons. The difficulty in designing it is indeed not about storing the field, but about the design of the brushes.

We see beautiful things, but in practice we have nothing.
 before to show othere things wee prefer have a sure thing like shadow!

We see beautiful things, but in practice we have nothing.
 before to show othere things wee prefer have a sure thing like shadow!

Well, despite this is a cool feature which I precisely would need, I have to say I thought Act3D would be focussing in the 4.3 final release which so many users waiting for, shadows, solving bugs...

Looks great!

yep really nice. I would be totally enthusiastic if we would also have the new shadow system 
Did you make some progress on the gi stuff from crytec ?
I am interested in that.

Remko, how do you provide perlin noise to shaders? Looks like you've added volume textures )))

I ask again for demo.

Hello? no answer?