EXCLUSIVES

Artmatic Voyager 1.0
Words by David Hutchison
March 2004

Eric Wenger is back with a new landscape generation tool for Mac® users. As the creator of the venerable Bryce® software (now owned by Corel® and recently discontinued for the Mac), Eric has already made a name for himself in the world of scenery building software. Now, U&I Software (www.uisoftware.com), the company he founded in 1997, has released ArtMatic Voyager 1.0 ($129), an easy-to-use tool for quickly building entire worlds from fractals. And we do mean entire worlds.

From Fractals to Terrains

Most landscape generation tools such as e-on Software's Vue d'Esprit turn mesh objects (e.g. pyramids), digital elevation data (e.g. terrains), and imported 3D shapes (e.g. building structures) into detailed scenes complete with texture mapping, lighting, and atmospheric effects. Such tools have the benefit of allowing users to control virtually every detail of their landscapes on a per object basis, but the scenes generated by such tools have definite boundaries. Unless a user creates them explicitly, mountain ranges do not exist hundreds of miles off into the distance. And rotating the camera even a few degrees left or right can bring into view a barren landscape.

Enter ArtMatic Voyager, a tool that generates, with one click, the landscape of an entire 60000 X 60000 km planet, complete with mountains, canyons, rocks, rivers, lakes, and skies. (No trees or shrubs however.) Users don't have the same level of control over individual terrain elements as provided by object oriented landscape tools, but they can point their camera in any direction (or instantly travel to a distant place) and be assured of viewing a fully formed landscape from the new perspective.

As with other U&I Software tools, the intuitive Voyager interface comprises a main window with editing and navigation tools laid out around a rendered view of the current landscape. To assist users in navigating the worlds they create, Voyager includes sliders for rotating, moving, zooming, and tilting the camera's viewpoint up or down. All of these settings (as well as various environmental properties and evolving ArtMatic Pro systems) can be animated over time.

ArtMatic Voyager generates stunning terrains that are detailed, rugged, and very realistic, particularly in terms of their mix of granular, granite, and icy textures. The water and snow textures are also noteworthy. A sea roughness setting controls both the choppiness and reflectivity of lakes and rivers and, for rendered animations, the wind speed of waves and clouds. Designers can quickly set both the sea and snow levels of a landscape to add or remove water bodies and control snow coverage on the ground and mountain peaks. Also on board are six types of cloud settings, as well as global wetness, ambience, and sunlight angle/color parameters. Only the haze setting lacked the subtlety, depth, and wispiness we were hoping for. With ArtMatic Voyager, a little haze goes a long way.

ArtMatic 3.5

Voyager generates the elevation points and texture maps for landscapes using fractal systems imported from its recently updated sister application, ArtMatic Pro 3.5 ($299 bundled with Voyager). Although Voyager users don't need to own ArtMatic Pro (Voyager has four built-in fractal systems of its own), the combination of Voyager and ArtMatic Pro does allow adventurous users to create landscapes of their own design from the ground up.

Among ArtMatic Pro's new features are enhanced band-limited noise components, an elevation mapped color shader, and support for multiple gradients. Each of these and existing features allows ArtMatic Pro users to create still and evolving landscape surfaces, texture maps, and backdrops for Voyager.

Still Images and Animation

When it comes to rendering still images, Voyager really shines. The tool sports a menu of bookmarks that allows designers to quickly save and return to specific camera view points. Users can batch render high quality still images of these views (perhaps overnight). For a subsequent version, we would like to see more user control over which bookmarked places are batch rendered. (Currently, it is all or none.) Voyager supports 4096 X 4096 pixel output, ideal for creating modestly sized posters and prints. We opened our rendered landscapes in Photoshop® and applied a little color/contrast correction to prepare our images for press.

On the animation front, Voyager 1.0 uses a simple keyframe approach to animate the camera and various environmental settings. Voyager tweens a rendered animation between keyframes, but we would like to also have the option of instantly transporting the camera from one viewpoint to another in order to render multiple animation sequences to a single QuickTimeš movie.

In other ways too, animation support is something of a work in progress. Unlike Vue d'Esprit, there is no support for tilting the camera horizontally (perfect for simulating the banking motion of a airplane as it turns). Also absent (surprisingly) is QuickTime VR output. A more serious concern is the amount of aliasing (i.e., randomly shifting elevation points) in the tips of some mountain peaks and complex textures when viewed mid-distance. This may be the result of Voyager's fractal-based architecture as we faced the same issue when using Pandromeda's MojoWorld, a less intuitive tool that relies on a similar fractal-based approach to generating landscape animation.

Pros: Detailed and spectacular landscapes. Stunning snow and granite textures. Very user-friendly. Batch rendering of still images > Cons: Limited animation support. No QuickTime VR output. Some aliasing in rendered animations.