Features

GPU based height generation thanks to material editor

GPUs are fantastic computation devices, with hundreds/thousands of computation cores available. Games such as Horizon Zero Dawn that fully rely on GPU for terrain and vegetation/asset placement, have been a large source of inspiration at the origin of Shader World.

World Position (XY) to Height output (Z)

Runtime layers

Runtime layers are textures generated alongside your terrain, which can compute and store information. Those layers are stored in textures which have three channels (Red/Green/Blue). Therefore adding a runtime layer, is adding three channels that can store information.

Information in layers can be:

IDs: Each pixel/texel(texture element) will hold a specific value between 0-255. As interpolating between IDs between neighbouring texel do not make sense, you prevent interpolation by setting the layer filter to 'nearest' option.

Blend weights: More traditionnally used, can hold the importance weight of a material over another. It's smoothly linearly changing over texel, and requires the 'bilinear' or 'trilinear' filter option.

Filtering is applied to the three channels of a given layer.

High performance fully triplanar landscape material

Adaptive terrain rendering topology

Smooth adaptive LOD transitions

Collection of premade high quality nodes (Material Functions)

Interactive brush system, localized edits of surface and layers

Density based asset spawning

Low-level Optimized Rendering - Virtual Shadow Map Cache

Custom Seeds generator, unique seed at every start

Can be leverage to create advanced render target seeds, like in the case of Ocean simulations using Fast Fourier transform.