Hey everyone, the project started with toying around with Ogre3D's Enhanced Terrain Manager a good while ago, attaching Navi for some quick & dirty ui-elements to it so we could use it as outdoor editor for our own game project. Since then I kept adding features to it. Turning out to be quite useful for us, I decided to polish it up a bit and release it to the public as free software.

Over the time it has been growing into a standalone project and an ok matured, production-ready tool, being nearly 3 years tested now. However Artifex Terra does not aim to be a fully fledged level editor. The object placement and editing functions are merely meant as helper to adjust your terrain properly to the objects you are planing to use.




Features: - (V1.0 RC1 - 01.03.2012 - Free Community Edition)

• Triplanar Splatting Shader (still WIP but works)
  
  
• Grass saving enabled now for everyone
  
  
• Scenes can be loaded with Ogres standard Terrain Scene Manager with full splatting and normalmapping support.
  
  
• Paged and animated grass support.
  
  
• Support for transparent textures.
  
  
• Open source C++ scene-loader class for easy project integration.
  
  
• Open source PHP-GTK based artifex-scene to ogre-dotscene converter. (note: about to be re-released with V1.0 RC2)
  
  
• Mesh based decal cursor resembling the current brush in pattern, size and rotation.
  
  
• 180 degree brush flipping.
  
  
• Editable project templates.
  
  
• SQlite based storage system, to ease the import in online games.
  
  
• Normalmapping and dynamic lighting support.
  
  
• Infinite custom object value pairs to edit game-content.
  
  
• 50 step Undosystem for all paint and terrain actions.
  
  
• Artpad support, tested with Wacom Graphire2 and Intous3 pads.
  
  
• Brushsystem with 10 different brushes, can be infinitely more.
  
  
• Brushrotation, random, snap to 11.25 steps and degreewise.
  
  
• Paintpressure is affected by the brightness of the brush you use.
  
  
• Colourpainting with several different tools: Paint, Erase, Darken, Brighten, Blur, Sharpen, Contrast, Noise and filters: GaussianBlur, Dilate, Edge,Erode,Repair,UnsharpMask,Sharpen,Noise,Clear.
  
  
• Terrain-shaping with 2 filters, and several different tools: Lower, Raise, Blur, Flatblur, Boil, Plane.
  
  
• Adding and editing of meshes, rapid placement with space+click for random rotation/placement.
  
  
• WYSIWYG texture adjusting, RGB, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast.
  
  
• Backblending of baked splatting textures to reduce texture tile effects.
  
  
• Texture-painting (splatting) with 9 different textures.
  
  
• Tested with terrain-sizes of 15000*15000 ogre units.
  
  
• Detailed documentation and help inside the application.
  
  
• Model pack with trees, plants, buildings.
  
  
• WYSIWYG grass painting.
  
  
• And more...
  

Screenshot UI:
The UI is completely HTML / Javascript based thanks to the use of Navi which makes it relatively simple to customize it to your own likings.


Click to enlarge.

Powerful brush-centric painting & editing:
Believing the brush is the artists most efficient tool, the brush system is carefully designed and Artifex built around it. It is very responsive and allows fine resolving sculpting and painting. There are many speed and comfort features on easy reachable hotkeys, like random brush-rotation [SPACE], brush-flipping [Ctrl+Space] or press [Enter] to get the pressure, size and shape dialogue delivered right to your mouse-pointer.


Texture Manipulation:
Here you can see the redvalue of the drygrass texture adjusted. You can adjust the 3 different colourvalues, brightness, contrast, saturation and see the effect right away on the terrain. This feature makes it incredibly easy to adjust a set of textures to eachother.

Click to enlarge.

BackBlending of baked textures:
This is something I found by accident toying around with ETMs baked texture. Taking that texture, increasing the brightness by 145% and using it as colourpass, gives a rather nice effect reducing the disturbing tile-effect of splatting textures a great deal. You can see the difference in the screenshot where I deleted a square part of the colourlayer again. I recommend doing that when you are done with most of the splatting before you start colourpainting.

Click to enlarge.

Input formats:
- Ogre3D meshes
- Ogre3D Syntax .material and shaders, CG, HLSL, GLSL
- Generic image formats like JPG, PNG, etc for textures and heightmaps
- Binary heightmap data

Output formats:
- same as above
- text based .cfg config files
- SQLite database files for storing Object properties and locations (done with online games in mind)
- Binary storage of the heightmap float values to prevent data erosion.

Most output formats are pretty generic, so with a little adaption you can load them with most 3D APIs.

Future plans:
- UI overhaul to QT
- Paging support
* Some more surprises...

Artifex Terra 3D 1.0 RC1 is freeware see README.txt for license details.

You can find the latest version (~150mb), updates and a sample scene loader here on the homepage: http://www.artifexterra.com

For a close-up peek into the features checkout the manual here: http://www.artifexterra.com/manual.php

... or visit our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/ArtifexTerra3D

It requires Win2000/XP (no clue about Vista), DX9, VC++ Express 2005 SP1 runtime, 2GHZ+ CPU, 1 GB+ Ram and a PS2.0 able Gfx-card, Nvidia 7600 GT works fine. So far it has been tested fine with various NVidia, ATI and Intel cards.

Enough Blah-Blah, suggestions, wishes, critics and feedback are most welcome, but be gentle.

It's a great work you've done here, and the fact that it can be used for the Ogres 3d engine is more than a +.

Keep it up.

Thank you for the nice feedback farcodev I looked at a couple of OSS engines and Ogre seemed to be by far the best choice, very consistent API and flexible, great material system, and a huge and friendly community with good support.