Phyronnaz
commented
3 years ago That sounds great! I definitely want to explore using the plugin alongside a regular landscape, instead of replacing it :)
Open mhomde opened 3 years ago
Phyronnaz
commented
3 years ago That sounds great! I definitely want to explore using the plugin alongside a regular landscape, instead of replacing it :)
Ok, hear me out, this might not be feasible, and it might be easy to see all the potential problems with this feature than the possibilities, but I genuinely think it's a potentially amazing idea so bear with me.
A little preamble, sorry...
So there's a decision to be made whether to go Voxels or Landscape for a game. You could do some kinda hybrid but ultimately one of the technologies will be dominant depending on your use case. Now, Unreal landscaping has gotten a lot more attractive lately with things like RVT's, landmass, the new water system (which will no doubt become more and more integrated) virtual heightfields, etc etc. While Voxels provide other benefits such as scale, dynamic terrain, and great tools. The tradeoff seems to be graphical fidelity vs scalability and dynamics.
Anyhoo, I found myself working with cliffs where overhangs, convex stuff, and caves are needed so I started looking at switching to Voxels, but there are so many cool things you can do with RVT's, etc that it feels like Rosemary's landscape baby.
But what if you could more easily use voxels with normal landscapes? You already can bake to mesh in the pro version but it's a little clunky going back and forth. Imagine instead you have a "mesh" that you simply "toggle" into voxel editing mode, and when you toggle out it automatically bakes it in place. Need 3D cliff formations? Place a voxel mesh, edit it as you like, and pop it back to a mesh. Need some more tweaking? Pop it back to voxels. The key is making the UX really easy so you can work in place and just switch in and out of "voxel editing mode"
The workflow would be amazing, all the strengths of your amazing voxel tools while retaining the possibility to use non-voxel landscapes with mesh cliffs, etc (which is nice in many ways anyway compared to landscape cliffs). Might be some things like UV's that are problematic but you'll probably be doing world-aligned stuff anyway.
Suddenly the Voxel Plugin goes from a somewhat niché technology to an indispensable general mesh editing tool. Booyah! Hope I'm not talking out of my bum.