PixelActive - World Editor

PixelActive World Editor

Geography
The PixelActive World Editor is an advanced real-time world building tool for generating large urban environments interactively. Using the editor, one can quickly build huge, complex environments such as cities and open worlds for use in video games and simulations. Generate Road and Terrain Geometry: Instantly create complex road networks with intersections integrated into a terrain with hills, mountains, and canyons. Road and terrain geometry can be tessellated to any desired level of detail. Import and Place Props and Buildings: Props, buildings, and other objects can be imported and placed interactively with a variety of intelligent placement tools. 3D data is imported through Collada, allowing instant compatibility with a wide range of industry standard modeling tools. What You See Is What You Get: Make changes to the world interactively and see the final results right away. Roads, hills, and props can be dragged around interactively while viewing the world with textures and shadows. Change Anything at Any Time: Make changes to the landscape and the roads and props will automatically adapt. Move a road around and the buildings and props on the road will move with it. Build Huge Worlds: Worlds can be any size and can be broken up into separate page-able chunks according to a variety of techniques such as uniform tiles, brick tiles, and arbitrary polygonal zones. Runs on PCs under Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista.



Place and Drag Geographical Features: Geographical features like hills and mountains can be independently placed and moved at any time. Different geographical features can be layered and blended where they overlap. Erosion Modeling: The editor can model erosion processes on geography to add further realism. Processes include fluvial erosion from water flow, diffusive erosion from wind, and soil creep. Import Elevation Maps: The system can import grid based elevation data, and multiple grids can be independently positioned, rotated, scaled, and combined with other geographical features. In addition, the editor can import real-world elevation data from several common GIS formats.

Road Networks

PixelActive’s powerful and unique road editing tools allow designers to instantly build complex interconnected road networks with roadways, intersections, sidewalks, bridges, tunnels, and more.

Interactive Road Digitizer: Create interconnected road networks with a few clicks of the mouse, then select and drag roads and intersections around in real-time. Adaptation to Geography: Road altitudes are stored relative to the underlying height of the landscape, so roads will automatically adjust if one changes the geography. Elevation and Banking: Road heights and banking can be adjusted along the road and smoothly interpolated. Road Styles: Users can create their own library of road styles with adjustable properties and user-defined textures and road markings. Road styles can represent a full range of road types including dirt roads, alleys, residential streets, major boulevards, and freeways. Complex Intersections: Handles complex intersections between multiple road types, as well as merge/splits intersections used in many common freeway interchanges. Bridges and Tunnels: Bridges, overpasses, and tunnels can easily be created as extruded geometry. Sidewalks and Medians: Sidewalks, medians, pedestrian islands, and other similar features can automatically be built into the roads. Tessellation and LOD: Roads are adaptively tessellated and trimmed into the terrain geometry. Additionally, the road system can be tessellated to multiple levels of detail.

Prop & Building Placement



Prop Import: Props can be imported through Collada from a wide variety of industry standard tools such as Maya, 3DSMax, Modo, SketchUp, and more. Library Management: Once imported, the system generates rendered images for the props for easy selection, and these can be grouped in a hierarchical directory structure to enable easy organization of large libraries with thousands of different props. Wide Variety of Prop Placement Options: Props can be placed and manipulated individually or through a rich set of group placement options. Group placement modes include placement within polygonal regions, uniform spacing along curves, placement according to imported density bitmaps, paint-like placement tools, and more. Randomization Features: Randomization tools allow for props to be rotated, scaled, and positioned randomly within user specified ranges. Automatic Adaptation to Changes in Roads & Terrain: Prop placement rules are remembered and can be re-run automatically to adapt to other changes in the system. For example, if you place a building along a road and later move the road, the building will automatically move with it. Also, props and buildings placed on the ground will adapt if the ground elevations are later changed.

Efficient Scene Generation

To achieve the level of performance required for modern video games, the editor has a variety of features specifically designed to optimize polygon counts of the world geometry, and organize the data for optimal culling and level of detail switching. Worlds created by the editor are scalable and can be adapted to match the performance and memory requirements for machines ranging from portable systems, to consoles, to high end PC graphics hardware.

Adaptive Tessellation: All road and terrain geometry created in the PixelActive World Editor can be adaptively tessellated based on curvature and other geometric properties. This allows the world to be modeled once and tuned to match the performance of multiple hardware platforms. Level of Detail: Terrain and road geometry can be output to various levels of detail to support runtime LOD switching. LODs can be grouped flat or hierarchical, and can support blending between different LODs. Cull Hierarchy Generation: The editor can generate an efficient cull volume hierarchy of spheres, axis-aligned boxes, or oriented boxes containing all geography, roads, and props. Overhead Image and Normal Maps: Terrain details are automatically baked into overhead image and normal maps to allow for high quality rendering of distant terrain with minimal polygon counts. Additionally, roads and small props can be rendered with geometry up close and can be baked into the image and normal maps for distant viewing. Various Tiling Options: The entire world can be broken up into uniform square, brick, or irregular polygonal zones for paging and memory management purposes, allowing the creation of worlds of unlimited size. Billboard and Proxy Generation: Distant geometry can also be baked into ultra low detail proxy objects or billboards for efficient rendering of distant trees and buildings. Object Instancing: Duplicated props and buildings are treated as instances to reduce memory usage. Object Clustering: Groups of distant objects can be automatically combined into a single mesh to minimize draw calls. Texture Packing: In conjunction with the object clustering tools, multiple texture maps for distant objects can be packed into a single map to reduce render state changes.

Import/Export



Import Props and Buildings: 3D data can be imported through Collada™, which is supported by numerous industry standard tools such as Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, SketchUp, Modo, Blender, and many more. Import GIS Data: The editor can import real-world data from a variety of common GIS formats, enabling fast creation of real locations with accurate elevation, road map, and land usage data. Export Geometry: Geometry created within the editor such as road and terrain meshes is exported through Collada™, allowing for import into many popular modeling packages. Export Layout Data: Layout data including prop placement information, culling hierarchies, and level of detail data, can be exported to Collada™ with a variety of different scene grouping options. Export Traffic Network and AI Data: Detailed traffic network data can be exported to XML, including information about lane geometry, intersection mappings, signal phases, and more.