History
After more than two years of internal developing, the program was first launched on as version 1.0. It immediately started to be used by various professional game studios and independent developers. Version 1.1 was launched on adding various optimizations, pen tablet support and more flexibility by introducing user defined data sets. Following this was version 1.2 on which optimized existing fractal tools and added new ones, extended import and export with new data formats and introduced the Grome scripting language for automated tasks. Major release, 2.0, was introduced on with many new additions. With this new version, Grome becomes a more complete outdoor editing platform by introducing editing of water surfaces, vegetation and other decoration layers. 64bit processing was introduced to take advantage of large amounts of RAM and 64bit CPUs. With this version, Quad Software announced the availability for customization work for professional studios that need a specific Grome version for their projects. The Grome 3.0 version was launched on bringing road networks editing, support for per-pixel materials, optimization tools for mobiles and low-end hardware and other new tools.Main features
General
Easy to use user interface, with shortcuts available for every operation. Real-time preview on multiple customizable hardware accelerated viewports. Presets system for tool parameters.Terrain editor
Supports unlimited terrain size using custom data swapping mechanism to hard disk space. Terrain made of multiple terrain zones supporting variable resolution and automatic border stitching. Procedural heightmap generation using fractal, terracing and erosion tools. Possibility to create and assign multiple layers of heightmaps for each zone. Manual editing of heightmap layers using selection layers andObject editing
User defined format system using Grome SDK plugins. Spawn objects individually or using brushes with custom orientation and area of effect. Tag, categorized, search and replace tools for objects. Gizmo and numeric object transformation tools for translation, scaling and rotation. Possibility to group object for transformation around common pivot. Groups can be saved to disk and later restored. Object-terrain linking mechanism that allows snapping objects to terrain and moving objects along ground surface.Road editing
Starting with version 3.0 road placement and manipulation was introduced. Control of road geometry generation, resolution, banking and intersections is now possible while real-time road/terrain interaction computation is done using the GPU.Water editing
Real-time water rendering using pixel lighting,Decoration layers
Allow rendering of massive population of decoration objects and grass blades. Animated grass effects to simulate wind and characters walking through. Generation with brushes or automatically based on terrain slope, orientation and altitude.Software development kit (SDK)
Offered for every Grome client to allow integration with their engine/application pipeline. Allows saving and loading from custom formats, define new mesh formats and automatic responses to various editing events. Comes with source code for all default plugins and documentation. Out-of-the-box, Grome has the default plugins to include support for COLLADA, XML, DTED, shape files, 16bit RAW, BT and all major images formats.Licensing
Grome 3.0 is currently licensed under two different prices, the same base version being offered to individuals and small developers under a reduced price. Professional companies benefit from premium support and dongle based protection. Normal builds offer file based activation per computer.Customization program
Starting with version 2.0, Quad Software publicly announced the availability of customization work for companies. In the way professional studios can obtain customized builds as part of under-contract projects. Examples of previous developed customized modules were presented, among them being road editing, AI navigation mesh generation and a more advanced lightmapper.Graphite Renderer
Graphite is a real-time outdoor rendering library created by Grome developers to allow easy integration of Grome scenes into any 3D engine and graphical application. The renderer is designed to be flexible and supports DirectXGrome scenes gallery
See also
* 3D computer graphics software *References
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