Grome 3.1 - What's New
Terrain Editing Additions
Enhancements to flowmap erosion tool.
Easily create new terrain zones based on existing ones. Zone create tool can now use an existing terrain zone as a template when creating new zones.
New Manipulate tool so you can change the material layers UV scale, rotation and offset using gizmos.
New cell mode for Terrace tool to apply variable terraces.
Possibility to indicate layers mask resolution as units per pixels. This helps user maintain the same visual resolution for zones of different sizes.
New Expand and Shrink filters for masks and selection layers.
Objects System
You can now organize your objects per separate layers.
All the layer operations (hide, show, enable, disable) are now available for massive collections of objects.
You can now write your own materials and shaders for objects. Shaders are written in OpenGL Shading Language. Have custom shader parameters exposed in Grome UI for the user to change.
Improvements to the package browser: name filter to quickly find resources, possibility to show multiple levels of folders at once, display options moved into a separate window for a more compact view, new modal-less mode while working with spawn tool to quickly change the current spawning object.
Enhancements to object spawn tools: pick mode to quickly respawn an existing object from scene, realtime preview of objects during brush operations, better distribution of objects when applying the brush.
Rendering
Improved terrain simplified mesh support: rendering of terrain meshes directly inside Grome with customized LOD distances.
Terrain pixel lighting using global normalmaps and a new terrain layer pixel lighting material (with specular maps, glossiness and various other parameters).
New pixel lighting material for objects with parameters exposed directly inside the editor UI.
Possibility to create custom LOD chains with their own materials. This allows the user to overwrite the built-in materials for external object formats (e.g. assign complex GLSL shaders to Collada objects).
Optimizations
10x to 20x speed gain for all flowmap operations! We've developed a new way of organizing large terrain data using sparse images, sharing data in RAM and on disk. Flowmap Erosion, MaskGen and ColorGen using flowmaps, Flowmap Select and others tools have significant speed increase and less memory demands.
Significant memory and speed improvements to the undo system, disk access and scene data memory consumption. We've improved terrain geometry data consumption (25-30% less memory occupied). Undo system now is using the scratch disk more efficiently, using more compact files.
SDK and Plug-ins
Improvements to Collada exporter: export of stitched simplified meshes, parameter to change geometry winding, option to remove terrain zones texture seams caused by bilinear filtering.
Improvement to OpenSceneGraph exporter: export of simplified meshes and new parameters.
Additions to SDK interfaces to allow access to custom materials, objects levels of details and other scene settings.
Integration with Engines
Graphite engine (our terrain middleware) was updated with all the new Grome features and now offers new lighting, shadowing and environment effects.
Integration of Grome terrain within Unity3D will be made public in short time.
A series of new tutorials will guide users through the entire process of creating terrain inside Grome, optimizing and exporting it and finally rendering it inside Unity3D.
Special techniques will be employed in order to optimize the terrain for rendering on desktop and on mobile platforms.
