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ALicu · Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2011 9:28 am Post subject:

Hello everyone!

Here we will try to keep you posted with our progress with Grome developing.

We are glad to announce you that lately we've been busy working on a new version update, Grome 3.1, which will be free for all the existing clients. This build should be ready in about 1 month (we are still doing final testing and updating the documentation and the site pages).

Some of the most important features you will find in the new build are:

- You can organize your objects per layers as any other editor data. Hide/show, delete, move, all the operations on layers are now available for objects too.

- You can now write your own materials and shaders for objects. Shaders are written in OpenGL Shading Language. You can even have custom shader parameters exposed in Grome UI for the user to change. Documentation has various tutorials exemplifying the entire process.

Improvements

Significant memory and speed improvements to various terrain tools, undo system, disk access, memory consumption. We've improved terrain geometry data consumption with about 25-30% (less memory occupied). Undo system now is using the scratch disk more efficiently, using more compact files.

Flowmap operations greatly improved (10x to 20x speed gain, yes it is not a typo). We've been implemented a new way of organizing our large terrain data (sparse image sharing data in RAM and on disk). This means that Flowmap erosion, MaskGen and ColorGen using flowmaps, Flowmap select and others tools have significant speed increase and less memory occupied.

UI Changes:

Improvements to the package browser:
- The browser has now a name filter so you can quickly show only some of the resources based on their name.
- Possibility to render in the same view multiple levels of folders. This together with the name filter can be used to quickly find resource in entire collections and folder hierarchies.
- Package browser options moved in a separate window to make room for the name filter and to make its UI simpler.

You can now assign material layers with texture resolutions based on the scene scale (as units per pixels) so the resolution is constant across zones of different sizes.

You will also find the UI of various tools change a little as new parameters were added.

Minor UI changes to the layers view.

Tools:

- Objects spawn tools improvements: live preview for objects brush, pick mode for object spawn, better random placement for objects brush.
- New cell mode for Terrace tool.
- New parameters for FLErosion tool for better control. New presets for the tool.
- 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.

Rendering:

- Improved simplified mesh support: rendering of terrain meshes directly inside Grome with customized LOD distances.
- Terrain pixel lighting using normalmaps inside Grome viewports.
- New terrain layer pixel lighting material (with specular maps, glossiness and various other parameters).
- New pixel lighting material for objects with various parameters exposed in the 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 shader to a Collada object).

SDK and Plugins:
- Improvements to Collada exporter: export of stitched simplified meshes, parameter change geometry winding, option to remove terrain zones texture seams caused by bilinear filtering.
- Improvement to OSG exporter: export of simplified meshes and new parameters.
- Various new addition to SDK interfaces.

Integration with Engines:

- Graphite engine (our terrain middleware) was updated with all the new Grome features and now offers new lighting and shadowing methods. We will post a separate announcement about its new version.

- Integration with Unity3D will be made public in short time (after the new Grome version). This includes a series of new tutorials how to get terrain from Grome inside Unity3D and usage of this terrain even on iOS platforms.

With time we will add more posts here with our progress.

Kind Regards,
Adrian L.