(if you look closely, you'll note that I painted greentooth into that flowmap)

Updated 4 October:
v0.9.2 for Windows
v0.9.2 for OSX

http://teckartist.com/?page_id=107

[update_4_Oct]
I've added the ability to actually load flowmaps, so you can either pick up where you left off in your last session, or load up a simmed flowmap to tweak, for example. Tiling/wrapping option, too. A few more additions and fixes in the 0.9.2 update (October 4).
[/update]


So I've been working on a vertex painter for Unity for a while now, and at some point decided to add flowmap painting functionality to it. Then I realised that this would be pretty useful outside of just Unity, so I ported most of the code to work at runtime, and put together a rudimentary standalone build. I'm gonna keep updating/maintaining it, adding functionality as necessary, as well as fixing stuff that might be broken. Also, I'd like to make it such that the UI isn't as fuck-ugly as it is currently :p

A video of it as of last Friday:

Working, rudimentary, standalone flow map painter...

I've since added [ugly] functionality to load your own tiling texture for preview, and also to load an overlay image (eg. an overhead shot of your terrain so you know how you want your flow to look like).

As a sidenote, this could probably be used to create maps for anisotropic specular, for example.

Have at it, and feel free to abuse the shit out of the feedback button to spam me with bug reports and suggestions!

oh wow! this is amazing! thanks for this excellent tool.

Oh god this is fantastic.

Is there any plan to include alternate brushes (like 'flow outwards' or 'flow inwards' or 'vortex') or anything?

Originally Posted by Brendan

Is there any plan to include alternate brushes (like 'flow outwards' or 'flow inwards' or 'vortex') or anything?

Yup! I've started getting the code ready for flow out/in (basically pinch/inflate). Vortex will take a bit of thinking, but should be doable. I'm also trying to implement a blur/blend brush.

<3 <3 <3

This really is amazing man, thanks so much for sharing this with the community!

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!!

It would be interesting to see a third dimension applied to this. I cant even imagine how editing that would work. *head explodes*

konstruct, you mean as the plane that currently exists just rotated in a 3d space, or actual importing of the target geometry that you are generating the flowmap for? I think the later would be more trouble than it's worth, seeing as textures are normally painted from this perspective anyway, I don't think the rotated plane would help either.

This app looks awesome, and I can already think of ways I can use this. Im going to see if the textures can be used to generate anistropic highlight normals for hair...

Awesome stuff Teck!

brilliant work!

Holy cow! Awesome job LoTekK

Great job!

Very nice! Sounds like you've got good plans for features too! Thanks!

I had actually written up an article on a new method for creating flow maps in Photoshop (just needed to create screenshots), but now it seems kinda useless :P.

Sweeeeeeeet!

amazing! thanks for sharing!

I`m thinking like a flow volume. As opposed to a 2d flow map surface I`m not sure if the usage would be for a simple texture anymore though, but more so control of the movement of AI, or FX in a 3d space or something. I dunno I`m kind of thinking out loud. Pay no attention to the crazy guy in the corner.

Wow......fucking impressive.

Thank you.

Wow, your app, if you will pardon my french, blows every other flow editor out of the water. Or lava... eh, it's up to you...

Absolutely fantastic!
The option to have the flow field lines visible (while simple enough) is genius

Wow awesome, I'll be using this a lot

Thanks for sharing. Will try it out soon.

Thanks for the kind words, folks!

I've done a bit of an update.
- fixed a bug with the overlay feature (it was broken)
- added a pinch/inflate brush, as well as a vortex brush
- added pan/zoom functionality
- version checker, too!
- I'm using a denser plane right now, since you can zoom in
- this unfortunately means the flow lines preview is a bit... slow

and its own page (since the version checker will direct you here if you're due for an update):
http://teckartist.com/?page_id=107


sinistergfx:
I'd actually be curious to see what you came up with. I love thinking up and seeing crazy approaches to impossible things

konstruct:
It's funny, actually, I'd started getting crazy ideas of using these to drive some sort of gameplay... directing particles or some such malarkey :p

Maybe an idea to have a customizable density? Make it scalable to low/high performance machines.

Originally Posted by Snader

Maybe an idea to have a customizable density? Make it scalable to low/high performance machines.

Sometimes I miss the most obvious things. Thanks for that, I'll figure a good way to roll that into the next update

Awesome stuff, LoTekK.

Denser grid, zoom and the inflate brush work awesome.

This is insanely cool.

I'm curious as to how this works, is the painting already being done in 3d with brushes being projected from the camera and pushing around vertex normals? Could it support panning and rotating around the plane with the camera? It would be awesome to have the ability to import geometry with non square, unwrapped UV usage to paint on as well as background geometry to guide you.