Sunday 9 October 2011

Terracraft WIP 1

Since Notch has yet to release the mod API I can't start on Sapphire Island yet, so in the meantime I've decided to continue on my terrain generation algorithm. So far, I've implemented the following:
  • Continents
  • Mountains, hills and plateaus
  • Rock strata
  • Regional temperature and height-based temperature lapse
  • Regional rainfall
  • Biome identification
Still to do:
  • Volcanoes
  • Orographic rainfall
  • Topsoil
  • Biome-based terrain features (canyons, mesas, oases, etc.)
  • Vegetation and other decoration such as boulders
  • Rivers
  • Caves
  • Ore distribution
  • Man-made structures (villages, ruins, etc.)
Below are two screenshots of  the current state. As you can see the map is quite a bit higher than a normal Minecraft map: I'm using a height of 512 instead of the default 128 to allow for proper mountains and generally get a more realistic scale; as in real life, a decent-sized tree for example will easily reach 20-30 meters. Sequoias can grow up to 100 m, which would take up almost the entire height of a standard Minecraft map. With the increase in height I can still have a mountain towering over a sequioa. The colors in the screenshots represent the biomes. Currently they have very clearly demarcated borders because I set specific cut-off points, but they're actually gradients so once I put in topsoil and vegetation they will smoothly blend into eachother. Below the terrain you can see cross-sections showing the rock strata. There are five types of rock (excluding the bedrock in the bottom layer of the map): sandstone, limestone, shale, granite and basalt. Each will have a different ore distribution. Diamond, for example will only appear in basalt. As usual, click for a larger view.



Friday 16 September 2011

mc2obj render: SMP revisited

One more rendering before I resume development of mc2obj. A while ago I posted a few renderings using mcobj. The render below uses mc2obj, and is taken from roughly the same viewpoint as the first mcobj rendering for the purposes of comparison. As usual, click for the full view.


Wednesday 14 September 2011

mc2obj render: Mountainview sunrise

I figured it was about time for me to stop working on mc2obj for a moment and actually make a render with it, so after creating a few 1.8-prerelease 2 worlds this one seemed interesting enough. I call it 'Mountainview sunrise". I must say 1.8 generates some interesting landscapes, though I do look forward to the day that I'm going to start on my own terrain generation alogrithm, because there are some aspects that I think could be significatnly improved. Anyway, as usual click the image for the full-size version.

Monday 5 September 2011

mc2obj alpha release


Today I finally have a version of my Minecraft exporter that can be used by the general public. Note that it is still an alpha release, so there are some known (and probably some unknown) bugs. You can get the release at Github. There you'll also find the readme with more details on how the program works.


Wednesday 24 August 2011

Minecraft .obj exporter part 2

My Minecraft .obj exporter can now export more than one chunk at a time. It took quite a bit longer than I hoped since the increased scale really brought to light the fact that I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to performance yet: things like parsing the regions lazily and building up the output as one giant string initially caused memory use to skyrocket. So I've spent the past few days learning a lot about Haskell performance, and it now performs much better. Memory isn't O(1) since I have to keep chunks in memory until all their neighbours have been processed, but since 3D Studio needs about 7-10 times as much memory to import the scene as I do to generate it it's of no practical concern anymore: if you run out of memory exporting a scene there's no way you would've been able to render it.

The main things still on the to-do list are:
  • Implementing the remaining materials
  • Implementing non-block geometry
  • Adding command line arguments so you can actually use the program with recompiling it
I've uploaded the project to GitHub: https://github.com/FalconNL/mc2obj

Below are two current WIP shots of an area of 32x32 chunks:


Sunday 21 August 2011

Minecraft .obj exporter part 1

For the renderings that have appeared on this blog so far I've been using mcobj, which is the de facto standard for exporting Minecraft worlds to 3D packages. Unfortunately, it has two main drawbacks:
  • It doesn't auto-apply any textures or generate any texture coordinates
  • It only outputs blocks, so anything with a different geometry (fences, railroads, torches, etc.) will show up as a block instead of using the correct geometry
Since it was last updated on May 15th, I don't foresee these issues being resolved any time soon. I therefore decided to take matters into my own hand and since I had no particular desire to learn Go I started writing a Haskell version from scratch. A couple minutes ago I managed to export my first full chunck.

There's still plenty of stuff to do (currently it exports each face of each block even if it has a neighbour on that side, there's no geometry other than blocks yet and only a subset of materials are implemented yet), but it's a start.


Saturday 20 August 2011

Concept art - Coral Harbor

Coral Harbor is the port of Sapphire Island. As you can probably tell it is based on the city of Venice, with waterways being the main mode of transport. The architecture is based on Greek fishing villages. The river that runs through the center of town originates at Amber Falls.


Monday 15 August 2011

Rendering test part 2

Spent the day playing around with rendering and materials. This time I used Vray instead of Mental Ray. I must say I'm rather pleased with how the water turned out, particularly in the second shot (as usual, click the images to see the full-size versions). It does take a while to render though (just over an hour for the second shot and I believe about 15-30 minutes for the first one). The only problem is that this is about as large as I can make the scene, since larger ones quickly exhaust the 2GB of RAM I have and subsequently bring my computer to its knees. Maybe I should start looking into getting a new one.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. I tried rendering a scene of 640x640 blocks again (the first two are 272x272) and this time it worked just fine. Interestingly, this render only took 26 minutes. Guess zooming out helps. This render is also a good illustration of the scale of Sapphire Island. I think Coral Harbor is going to have about the diameter of this entire scene. And since Coral Harbor is only a small part of the island, you can see it's going to be a fairly large project.




Saturday 13 August 2011

Rendering test

Since the island is going to be rather large, taking ingame screenshots isn't going to be very useful, given the rather limited view distance in the game. Fortunately, there's a tool called mcobj that can export a Minecraft world to an .obj file, which you can import into a 3D rendering package such as Blender or 3D Studio. I spent some time and made a test render of my previous SMP world to see how well it works. It's not exactly perfect (torches become yellow blocks, for example), but I think it will suffice for the overview shots.




Concept art - Amber Falls

Amber Falls, named for the giant amber-colored crystal that illuminate the city, is carved into the tallest mountain on the island. Most of the houses lie around the central pillar of rock. The spiral staircase that is carved into this pillar provides access to the different levels of the city. Below the city lies a giant cavern.


Sapphire Island overview

The map below shows the approximate geography of the island, the locations of the five towns and roughly where the different biomes are going to be.


A whole new world

I'm a big fan of the game Minecraft. If you've never heard of it before, it's pretty much the ultimate sandbox game: you are given a world that you are free to reshape in whatever way you wish. Do you think that mountain would look better five feet to the left? You are free to move it. Think that valley would look better with a town in it? You can build the town. It's like having a gaint LEGO set, but you can actually walk around in it.

A couple months ago, I built some stuff on a SMP server I shared with some colleagues. I made the video below to show my progress after one month.



This was around the time of Minecraft version 1.2. There have been a number of versions since then (we're currently at 1.7.3), but none of them have significantly expanded the possibilities for creating your own world, which is why I haven't played much of it in the past few months. With the release of version 1.8 and the API sometime later this year, though, this is set to change. Some of the more important changes are:

  • With the API, we will be able to increase the world height beyond the default 128 blocks. This means we can start making some actual mountain ranges.
  • User placed leaf blocks will no longer decay. This increases the types of vegetation that can be used, allowing things like palm trees and ivy.
  • Adding custom blocks will be much easier once the API is out, which means there is pretty much nothing stopping you from making your world exactly the way you want to.

In preparation for this, I've started planning my next project, entitled "Sapphire Island". It will be a fairly large island, probably something in the order of 2000x2000 to 4000x4000, with five cities and a bunch of different biomes on it. On this blog I'll be posting concept art and, once the new version is released, WIP shots of construction.