As an extension of the work I’ve been doing creating a vertex painter for Unity in my spare time, to which I recently added flowmap painting functionality, I realised that a standalone flowmap painter might be pretty handy for non-Unity peeps. So, I spent some time over the weekend porting the editor API stuff over to runtime code, and built a standalone.
So the general idea is that creating flowmaps has so far traditionally been the work of, say, Houdini sims, or complex particle setups which are baked out, or more recently, standalone editors that involve placing lots and lots of curves. Valve’s wiki kinda says it best:
Overall, trying to create a flow map manually is a nightmare.
I wanted something a bit more artist-friendly, hence my little excursion here. Basically, this just allows you to paint your flow maps. Grab your stylus, load up a topdown image of your terrain/world, and get paintin’!
UI is pretty rudimentary right now (eg. needing to type a path into the text field, instead of a file browser, which Unity’s runtime doesn’t have out of the box), but the functionality is there (including 50-step undo… uh, redo is still being worked on). I’m planning to add a couple different brushes (pinch/inflate, possibly vortex, and probably a blur/smooth brush).
There’s a big feedback button in the ui, so feel free to abuse the hell out of it to spam me with any bug reports or suggestions.