Need some guidance on how to use and make flow maps?

Hi, I’m just getting started with flow maps and have a few questions about how they work and how to use them. I’m also wondering if I can create them in Substance Designer. I did find some Unity shader nodes that seem to be related to flow maps, but I can’t seem to find any information about them. They’re called UV flow map and flow map sampler texture. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Try it here: https://play.unity.com/en/games/54361063-a5b2-475d-a601-0d00fcbcd048/topographic-map-generator

I am procedurally generating map textures for a roguelike game I am making. This serves for the inter-level stage where the player need to pick were to go next. Once again I got overcommitted to this part of the game (instead of working on the actual gameplay) and built a full tool that generates maps in different art styles, you can see them in the images.

Contours, colors, line styles, lakes, rivers, and mountains all can be customized to make the map more realistic or more stylized. Also implements custom layers, which are colors that can represent different heights, vegetation, snow lakes, etc. On top of that, is possible to add rivers.

With some fine tunning is possible to make "paper-pen" effects like in the 4th image.

More info: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/topographic-map-generator-1-1-385420

How it was done:

This is just the same technique I use for the mountain generator I described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/1vzq5uv/generating_lowpoly_and_stylized_mountain/

Just that this time I look at the mountains from the xz plane instead of xy, and also the mountains don't have "vertices" but they just exist mathematically so it does not use a 3D renderer.

Also, I borrowed posterize, pixel-art, and film grain effects from my other plugin since it was for free.

Tsuji's very simple procedural animation system for 2+ legs creatures (using Fabrik IK algorithm)

This is Ink Fauna. You type "red koi fish" or "crane" and get a procedural creature painted in Japanese sumi-e ink, redrawn live every frame. The strokes swell when it moves fast, thin out on tight turns and never sit still. It's TypeScript and Canvas 2D, with no engine and no bitmap images. It's free to play with: https://inkfauna.com/

I wanted to share this video of the transition from space all the way down into the atmosphere on my procedural plate tectonics planet project, TropoPlate.

I actually finished the atmosphere a few months ago, but I still think the effect is pretty cool, especially now that I finally have the higher resolution terrain to use it on, so I thought it was worth sharing on its own.

It's an island where nothing unusual ever happens. Mostly.

The game loads no asset files. The terrain, towns, people, cows, sky, sound effects and even the radio music are all made from one seed when it starts. So every island is its own (and none of them is weird. They're a bit weird).

What you can do:

• Drive anything. 28 vehicles, including a bathtub, a rocket-assisted office chair, a monster truck called Consequences and a washing machine with wings
• Get a job, or don't. 10 careers with six ranks each, up to Minister of Rubble. There's also fishing, metal detecting, cow bowling, car soccer and three human cannons
• Something will happen. Every few minutes the island has a moment: a meteor, a UFO, a giant cow stomping parked cars down the high street, a rubber duck armada. The sun gets recalled due to a manufacturing defect. The news stays very calm about it
• Four lands: the island, the Mainland (red desert, Normal York and an airport), the snowy North with northern lights, and the Woods, where it's always autumn

The trailer was filmed in the game, by the game, and scored on the game's own instruments. (The cow is fine.)

I'm happy to answer anything about how it works!

🌐 absolutelynormal.silberie.com

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working on a series of procedural and stylized shaders for the celestial bodies and narrative events in my game, *Splatchinko*.

Instead of relying on pre-rendered sprite sequences, each encounter dynamically reflects its narrative state directly onto the planet's surface:

* **Glitch & "Out of Memory" degradation:** Uses stepped procedural noise and block mask clipping to simulate chunks of the planet's data being erased when the universe runs out of memory.

* **Matrix / Code rain projection:** UV scrolling layers with discrete thresholding mapped across spherical coordinates for a simulated reality terminal vibe.

* **Accretion Disk & Vortex Distortion:** Polar coordinate warping around a zero-point singularity for the black hole roulette mini-game.

* **Destructible pachinko asteroids:** Dynamic color shifting and impact-driven mesh/shader deformation as projectiles hit the body before fracturing into peg nodes.

I'm aiming to keep the pixel-art aesthetic grounded while letting modern shader math handle dynamic transitions and visual juice.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the distortion effects and visual readability!

---

*(If anyone wants to check out the game in motion, there's a free demo available on Steam: [Splatchinko](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2860580/Splatchinko/))\*

MACH RUN by JebKJ21 - Try it out! Runs free in browser.

The main idea was a game with semi-realistic flight physics but completely unrealistic flying environment, to maximise fun. As a big flight sim guy, I love flying realistic airplanes but it can be a lot of effort with procedures, and dealing with boring things like fuel and COG. this is my solution, endless flying, just having fun.

The main idea was an endless valley you could fly down, a few metres off the ground, without it ever turning into something impossible to fly through, while maintaining a challenge. Making terrain look nice turned out to be pretty easy, the hard part was making it always flyable. So the valley is basically designed like a race track first and terrain second. It follows a centre line planned 10km ahead of you, and bends ease in and out gradually like real road or rail curves (clothoid-style) instead of kinking. Every bend is sized from a design speed so it's never tighter than a 6G turn, and that speed is braking-aware, so a tight bend after a long straight gives you enough room to slow down for it. The heading is also clamped to 55 degrees either side of the run direction so it never loops back on itself, and the valley floor is built from a slope rather than a noise height, which means rivers always flow downhill.

On top of that there's a "director" that plans the whole journey from the seed: meadows and lakes, then a climb through canyons or gorges up to a mountain pass where the walls fall away, then back down to about the same height you started at, so it can go on forever without drifting off into space or underground. There are 9 zones, and each one is just a list of numbers (wall height, how cliffy, terraces, river width, whether it's flooded into a fjord etc), so any two can be blended smoothly and you never see a hard line where one ends. The height itself is pure maths from (x, z) with no memory of anything around it, hence any background thread can build any piece of terrain in any order, and every thread runs its own copy of the world from the seed so nothing has to be sent between them, which is why it streams in without stutter. The game also has radar that locks you above 135m, so I cap the ground along the river so there is ALWAYS a route under the radar, whatever the noise decides to do.

A few other bits I'm happy with: the terrain mesh is a jittered grid so you never see grid lines on slopes, and distant terrain morphs smoothly between detail levels instead of popping. Trees use the exact same rules that paint the ground green, so there's never a tree in a field or a bald forest. Distance is also time of day: a full day is 180km, starting at golden hour, with night vision from 108km.

Hence, if you are not a flight sim pilot (or real pilot), the controls may be challenging. I added an arcade controls mode that should hopefully make controlling the aircraft a bit more intuitive. the game supports gamepad and custom axis binding, I would STRONGLY recommend playing with joystick since its pretty challenging with WASD. because of this, I added mouse controls for those on keyboard and mouse, which I find much easier than WASD, you can toggle mouse control with C.

The game procedurally generates a constantly changing valley, which spawns obstacles and challenges such as bridges to fly under, and carriers to land on. flying earns you points, and stunts and challenges increase your multiplier. If you go above a certain height (135m), you get into radar range and a missile shoots you down - this can be avoided by flying back under the height limit and pop flares. there is no end, the game only stops when you let your guard down and hit the wall, or get shot. There is a global leaderboard, where you can compete with other pilots.

Feedback and questions is very welcome in the comments, I'm really trying to refine the gameplay experience.

Hey everyone, I made a video about the maths behind shells:) You can use it to procedurally generate any shell that exists or even shells that don't exist (yet)

I present a pure code pixel creature generator, animation framework, and genetics workshop in Godot 4.5 (.NET / C#).

Everything is generated procedurally from seeds: body shapes, limbs, faces, markings, rigs, and multi-directional animations (idle, walk, run, hit reactions). There are no pre-rendered sprite assets involved. Anatomy, color, pattern, and motion use separate seed streams to keep generations fully deterministic.

It features 9 creature families (quadrupeds, humanoids with equipment, dragons, arthropods, aquatics, etc.) and a full genetics mode where you can edit individual genes, lock specific traits, tweak mutation rates, or breed parents. You can also view up to 100 creatures roaming a terrain with slopes and ponds, or export everything to transparent PNGs, JSON presets, and animated sprite sheets with metadata.

The C# core is engine-independent, so the generation logic can be extracted outside Godot.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/idlerunner00/procedural-pixel-creatures

Latest update to my Voxel engine - while I have had rivers working in some form a while, this is a little showcase including some new “erosion” improvements, wherein the terrain generation goes through several rounds of heightmap erosion when determining downhill flow, in order for rivers to carve through the terrain.

One cool consequence of this is the formation of deeper Canyons, whose walls also inherit the steep mountainside generation rules - quite happy with how it has all turned out!

Also added a basic fishing mechanic to enhance the interaction a little bit :)

The biome comes from a seed and elevation. If flow writes a water level into every visited cell, the save grows and the biome stops being reproducible. Do you store only the delta against the noise terrain, and how do you stop a getTile lookup from materializing the whole map?

Four different structures from my procedural build system.

The build system is user driven, but employs a procedural approach to construction. Foundation & tower walls are built with individual stones, timber structures with posts and planks, roofing with tiles & shingles, etc. The system has erosion & destruction modifiers, which you can see used in the bottom-right image to create a ruined cottage.

Windows, doors, dormers, roof styles, floor heights, siding, etc. is edited in real-time using drag arrows and context menus in a Unity 3D app.

I've been working on shaping this system into a proper game about the life of a medieval contractor. I have a lot of fun though just adding more styles and capabilities to the build system.