Shader World : procedural landscape, ocean, foliage

GPU-accelerated Procedural World Creation: Compute Shaders, Virtual Heightfield Landscape, Ocean, GPU foliage system.

ShaderWorld is a code plugin built by qualified engineers with at least a master degree in computer science.

Shader World Documentation

Roadmap

Downloadable demo map (available in plugin content folder)

April 2024:

*New*

Fluid Ninja Live 1.9 Short tutorial

December 2023 :

Tutorial – Use any Landscape Material

Tutorial – Spawnables

November 2023:

11/21/2023 : 3.6 Release Livestream Material Interface | Terrain holes (caves) |

11/8/2023 Version 3.5 Patch Note: GPU Backend translated to CPU | Mesh Brush Components | Tiled import | Performance

Integration Tutorials:

Ultra Dynamic Sky tutorial + material setup (4 first minutes)

Fluid Ninja Live 1.9 Short tutorial or longer version: Fluid Ninja Integration tutorial

Shader World is an alternative to Unreal Engine Landscape, with a different terrain rendering strategy which better respects the terrain topography thanks to an adaptive terrain topology, it is also fully editable at runtime in packaged games, while Unreal Engine Landscapes cannot be modified once the game is packaged.

Shader World surface rendering can also be used to efficiently compute and render dynamic surfaces such as Oceans.

Shader World relies on GPGPU, General Purpose GPU programming, to generate its surface and place assets. It is currently the only fully GPU accelerated tool for procedural world generation available on the Unreal Engine marketplace.

For a given terrain resolution: World surface, collisions, and asset spawning are all generated on GPU deterministically. The only requirement is compute shaders supports, which for Smartphones means at least OpenGL ES 3.1 compatiblity, and for desktop GPU: any GPU since 2013.

Shader World plugin is a high performance modern procedural world toolkit, integrated in Unreal Engine ecosystem, with fast iteration and instant feedback.

Drawing inspiration from industry leaders and standards, the asset spawning framework is heavily inspired from the one currently used by games such as Horizon Zero Dawn.

Technical Details

Tested and compatible with : Windows 10, Mac (arm M1), iOS(IPad mini), Android (S9 OpenGL&Vulkan)

Documentation: Shader World Plugin – Documentation

Github access : see end of Description for proof of ownership

Features:

World creation from a Material function and Blueprint Brushes : fast iteration, instant feedback
Modern Virtual HeightField as a Geometry clip map representation
Landscape data layers : runtime computed equivalent to traditional UE4 Landscape layers
Mesh and Actor spawning with custom density functions : GPU Driven, using Data layers
BP Brushes can write into landscape layers : Heightmap Brush demo writes flowmap
16 Bits Heightmap import using a blueprint tool (raw/png 16bits)
Compatible with mobile (Android & iOS) and desktop devices (Windows & Mac)
Spawnable Meshes can enable collisions only at proximity for optimal performance
Scalable Landscape Material: Clean and Commented, Manage Multi Biomes and feature performance options

Code Modules: