JakeD7 writes:
I have done the impossible. After 4 years of school, and a bit of time settling in at my job, my schedule has finally, somehow, strangely enough opened up!
I'm so excited to be able to update some of my Blender projects, and I have a lot of ideas to start working on! One of the first things I've done though is upgrade my UltiMaze add-on from Blender 2.78 to Blender 3.1! I'll be actively supporting it for any 3.x versions, so if you run into any issues, just shoot me a message, and I'll get it sorted out ASAP.
You can check it out on Gumroad here.
Also available on Blender Market.
I've also started playing with the "new" geometry nodes, and found out just how revolutionary they are. It's nothing special, but I played around with using geometry nodes to add trees or buildings to the generated mazes, and I'm excited about the possibilities.
Would there be interest in having this add-on build a node structure that constructs a maze in real-time as opposed to creating the geometry directly? Let me know in the comments :)
Without geometry nodes, you can still use custom models in this add-on, but I think there's going to be a ton more potential now. Here's a more stylized tile setup I used back in the day; I'm not much of an artist, so I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some more creative results from the community!
You can use use the built-in ones packaged with the add-on (like these pipe assets) or whatever custom tiles you want.
Lastly, here's some screenshots of what geometry nodes can easily do (you can get the Blender file and join the discussion on Blender Artists here):
Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support everyone! Looking forward to seeing what y'all create with this!
6 Comments
Definitely interested when combined with the powerfull geometry nodes.
It’s nice there is already the possibility to use for example the pipes assets or other custom tiles.
Would it be possible to have a custom 3d object as the maze center and then to be able to let flow the maze around it?
That sounds like a great idea! You can already sort of do that artistically by using our image to maze conversion (you can define a pixel-based b/w image where white=path and black=wall https://s3.amazonaws.com/markets-rails/uploads%2F1483381210008-ImageTo3D.png).
But I really like the concept of blocking off certain tiles while generating the layouts. I want to do an overhaul of that code anyways because I think there's huge performance improvements to be had. I legit wrote some of that layout code as my first every programming project and now I'm a full-time software engineer with almost 10 years of experience.
If you want to follow development, follow the thread and post your ideas over on Blender Artists: https://blenderartists.org/t/addon-ultimaze-artistic-custom-maze-generation/681950
Thanks!
Jake
P.S. this is now my 3rd time trying to reply to you, hopefully BN doesn't make my comment disappear again *crosses fingers*
Update, here's an example of using the image conversion tool. I drew the concept in Gimp using the pencil tool to draw B/W pixel lines, then processed it with UltiMaze in Blender.
https://imgur.com/yKfWVyw
That would be a cool idea! You could certainly achieve this artistically now with an image maze (this can convert a pixel-based b/w image to a 3D maze), but that's not built into the layout gen code by default. I like the idea though of making regions of the grid "unavailable" for UltiMaze to build paths into, so I'll take a look sometime this week.
If you want to stay up to date on development, I'd recommend following the Blender Artists thread here: https://blenderartists.org/t/addon-ultimaze-artistic-custom-maze-generation/681950/
Cool, i will follow the Blenderartists thread.
Saw already some interesting remarks over there, like adding city elements to it which i was also thinking about.
Now to support the Ultimaze development, i have now bought Ultimaze on Blendermarket.
Especially because on the macOS platform there is no real Maze creator tool i’m aware of.
Thank you so much! I appreciate it :)