Anyone here have some tips on starting a project in Voxel Farm?
I just bought it yesterday and though there are a lot of videos of using it, a starting from scratch video seems to have eluded me. They have example projects to look at, but I have yet to create a working project on my own.
If you haven’t checked it out, they have a reasonable pricing plan for indies.
Any feedback from anyone?
This just posted by another Voxelfarm early adopter.
Its more of a log of him doing battle with VF, with some potentially help notes, rather than a tutorial or guidebook.
I just purchased VF today, ready for an integration “adventure”
I picked up the $19/year license to experiment around with their tools, but I haven’t actually spent more than about half an hour with them altogether. While I liked how the editor could convert a model into voxels, I simply didn’t care for them and they felt unintuitive.
Thanks guyal, will have to check out the link.
I’ve not found some of the tools intuitive either, but I do like the right click options menu.
Any new developments for people that have had VoxelFarm a while now?
I just got an indie license but the demos wont load in VS 2013 or outside of it for me =[
The Unity plugin works great, but I bought it to input voxel math and tackling this script from zero is not going to be easy… I don’t have any interesting in the voxel studio… for now anyway, looks like it will be good for adding meshes to randomly place with the engine later.
I am starting to see the steps being taken from dat files into the voxel engine but… ya there’s still really no tutorial on the web that I can find or people talking about their experiences with it…
The only real info I’ve found is on their blog, which of course is very limited.
Actually, I’ve never even learned how to create my own scene in the program.
My main purpose at this point is to wait until the developer tools are mature in the program,
then I was told by them they will be moving all of it’s capabilities into Unity.
As for anything else, I have no idea.
If you haven’t already, I recommend you write them at - support at voxelfarm dot com - they always follow up,
I’m sure they will be helpful.
Thanks for the reply.
I did write them before buying and they replied right away. I have mailed my specific question just before the weekend, so hopefully I will get a reply early Monday!
I haven’t from zero to product fully tried to make my own scene, but I think I could if I tried using VoxelStudio. That portion of it I have a partial understanding of… even just that though there are still a lot of unknowns… I was hoping to bypass VoxelStudio altogether for now though… maybe I should pay it more attention when I get home today.
There’s only so much you can do with heightmaps though. A lot of levels in my game cannot be generated with heightmaps.
I’ll continue to post here if/when I learn more. They need a community site for licensees… I wonder how many they have?
I got a simple scene working.
Problem 1: I had to use their example files as export RAWs from Photoshop CS5 are not properly registering with VoxelStudio. ie: their size doesn’t automatically show up like it should, though the image itself appears…?
Problem 2: mesh does not seem to be transferring to collision detection though I spent a total of zero seconds trying to figure out why. Player camera just falls through it.
Biome → Layer → heightmap+mask+mats.
it seems that it is using the input user data to create a world and then throwing the camera at a random location (x20,000,z10,000) in other words I assume I could run and run through this and the engine would continue to build off of it… so that’s a good start. I’ll try to play from there.
Hopefully will have an answer from support in a few hours (off to bed for me - Japan). Then I’ll ask them about the RAWs not importing properly.
Thanks for keeping this updated.
I wrote them on June 10th about the RAW from Photoshop failing in VoxelFarm.
Haven’t heard anything back. From my experience this means they are working on it now and will probably show up in the next update.
About going through mesh thing: Are you sure terrain and your character has mesh collider and you’re not doing things like e.g. modifying character’s transform directly and instead using say, rigidbody?
This is all using the VoxelFarm SDK, so I can’t actually select and look at the mesh.
I made a quick box and it fell right through it… their player camera is a little weird now that I look at it… but it is the mesh that’s lacking colliders. I just threw the scene together following their tutorial, there are no doubt many steps I’m missing still.
Just had a HUGE thunderstorm though, got some on cam, I’m gonna take a bath.
Still waiting on a reply… can’t really play around with VoxelStudio 2 with the RAW imports not working.
Just a sanity check which I got caught out on, when importing the RAWs - look at the left hand side of your filenames…
Some RAWs MUST be 16-bits while others MUST be 8-bits, if that is out, they just won’t go in - and you get the exact problem you are describing…
Anyway - hope this helps, as I’ve had little problem importing my own RAWs so far…
As for the first person camera in the toolset - yeah - the collisions are atrocious for me also…
EDIT: and when I say left hand side of the filename - I mean in Voxel Studio 2 - where you load them in - it will say something like “FileName (8-bit)” or similar - I don’t have it on this pc - so I’m not exactly sure what it is…
EDIT 2: Looking through the documentation it seems Hieghtmaps are 16-bits per pixel, Masks and Displacements are 8-bits per pixel, I can’t think of other instances, except materials which are all RGB or RGBA…ProProfs - Help Made Simple and the following desribe this…
Final Edit: Perhaps someone should startup a wikia site for VoxelFarm or something - I mean that might even help out some - I’d be willing to contribute what I’ve found - the documentation covers everything - sure - but its all so glossed over it makes my eyes bleed…
Problem here is PS 2015 only outputs an 8bit version, even if the settings in the image are 16 bit,
of maybe I don’t know what I am doing.
there should be the option for 16 versus 8bit under the mode settings.
the full listed requirements also clearly state no headers, image dimensions in a power of two and square, IBM format.
I tried 256x256 and 512x512 in both 8bit/grayscale and 16bit/grayscale.
in my case the images are previewing properly in VoxelStudio so… it’s reading them without any headers. but it doesn’t auto-recognize the dimensions and so won’t let me use them.
on my way home with some RAWs from CS2 I made at work. I have CS5 at home that was not working for me.
well all my files seem to be working now. those that did not work last week, and the new ones I created today. ??
I’m also getting the error now that heightmaps and masks need to be the same size, so that will have to become a common rule. I’ll try to get a basic scene setup with it now.
will have to try restarting the program or maybe even the comp next time the problem crops up.
Again I’m using Photoshop CS5 (CS2 which is free online worked too) Grayscale (1 channel: black), 16bit, dimension are a power of two and square. Exporting as Photoshop RAW, IBM format, headers: 0
Hi, I have a question for anyone using voxel farm, does it allocate gc every frame?
this is an issue I’ve not been able to solve wondering if the voxel farm people have
Thanks 
that’s a pretty deep question. access to the main engine costs 1,000$ and not its sub-componants. I’m not sure where I would look for that to begin with, but anyone can read their documentation here:
http://docs.voxelfarm.com/get-voxel-farm
under programmers → SDK → reference
Hi,
sily question, but is it worth that price tag compared to the voxel solutions on the unity asset store?
cheers
not at all if you aren’t a pretty advanced user.
The main benefit of the indie license is not just the engine but the VoxelStudio which comes with capabilities for turning any 3d object into the voxel world, as well as their own noise/tiling algorithms. If you’re looking for something that can get a decent world loading with speed there are some fine options for much cheaper on the asset store.
What I’m trying to do doesn’t work with any of the other engines and not even VoxelFarm yet, so I trying to bend it to my will as the most powerful of the choices. Ultimately it is still pretty young and pretty difficult to use. If you just want random beautiful landscapes that are fully voxel based and deformable then yes VoxelFarm is an awesome tool. But getting deep into it has been pretty hard for most of us it seems, me included.
depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
