Grome
Grome is an environmental modeling package developed by Quad Software dedicated for procedural and manual generation of large virtual outdoor worlds suitable for games and other 3D real-time simulation applications.
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. A new updated, version 3.1, was launched on October 12, 2011 with focus on optimization. A further update, version 3.11, was made on September 12, 2012, fixing various issues and improving the SDK.
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.[Image:Grome ui 01.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Overview of the Grome 2 User Interface]
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 and brushes. Flexible brush system that allows custom orientation, mask, strength, directions and pen tablet pressure. Elevation, terracing and fractals brushes.
Novel texture layering system that allows different shading methods, variable resolutions and images per terrain zones. Creation of images based on brushes or procedural generation based on slope, direction, altitude, external shape files and erosion flowmaps.
[Image:Grome ui obj.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Transforming objects in Grome editor using 3D gizmos,]
Object 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.[Image:Grome canyon.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Canyon map created in Grome editor]