PlayCanvas Editor Terrain Tool Plugin

Work in progress
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Hi guys, it’s been a while since I posted here.

I come to you with good news, after all these years making games with PlayCanvas, i’ve found a path I can follow to make one of the tools that i’ve always missed from Unity and which weren’t in PlayCanvas.

That is, a full fledged Terrain Editor!

After the team fixed in-editor console.log freezing the active window, i’ve been able to finally progress and I’m positive soon I’ll have a decent plugin to offer.

I’ll use this thread to provide updates on how it’s going, new features, etc.

As of today, the plugin is able to generate a terrain mesh within the editor which uses a heightmap from your Assets, and we are able to modify it in real-time with a simple brush feature, and an option to grow or decrease the terrain.

Terrain Editor Demo 2

Next features that I want to implement:

  • More and better brushes to work with the terrain.
  • Runtime generation with the same heightmap from the editor (1:1 copy).
  • Runtime Integrated physics with PlayCanvas’ default physics engine (Ammo.js) and also with Cannon.js.
  • Texture painting brush.
  • Grass painting brush.

Note that I also create this thread to know how interested people are in a plugin like this. So if you like it, please do comment below, sadly I don’t have much free time nowadays, so i’ll dedicate time based on motivation.

6 Likes
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Welcome back! You should also hop onto the Discord where we have some other developers doing some extensions to the Editor :smiley:

1 Like
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@devMidgard It does look interesting and yes something that I would consider as I am doing most terrain and scene development in Blender. Can you share how this will be distributed? Licensing or open source? Thanks in advance.

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Update: Fixed saving of the heightmap to the project files so it can be later used to load it up again and continue your progress, and it will also be used for the game runtime.

Also, improved how brushes work + added a nicer spot graphic to detail where you’re actually going to affect the terrain at.

Upcoming: UI Work, Texture Painting, and runtime + physics.

@Tirk182 Still undecided.

@yaustar I had already joined many years ago, didn’t know it was active nowadays, will be sure to share this stuff over there and see what others are working on.

2 Likes
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Texture Painting now in!

Supports 4 textures at the moment:

  • A base one which is filtered as black color.
  • Then 3 more textures on the R, G, B channels.

Next, runtime & physics!

1 Like
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Mini update, just using the Texture Painting brush mode, and some work on the toolbar UI.

This has got super satisfying!

3 Likes
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where can i get it i really need this for the game im working on currently

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@Maximos_Finley It is still not available publicly. What do you exactly need?

1 Like
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im making a game and a terrain editor would just be amazing, since my game takes place in the forest

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Hey I was wondering if you were still working on this?

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Hey, not actively. I stopped using the PlayCanvas Editor and instead work offline now, so I didn’t see any necessity for me to finish this.

Also, i’m not sure if it’s still the case but I stopped working on it because there isn’t a proper “Asset Store” in which I could sell this seamlessly.

1 Like
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well do you have a stable version at least?