Valve Corp, the PC gaming company that partnered with HTC Corp on the development of the HTC Vive virtual reality headset, has just released a free VR development suite called Destinations Workshop Tools. The new program allows developers to create and share virtual “Destinations” that simulate real or imagined locations.

“We’ve seen all of the awesome things the community can do with user-generated content, not only in our own games, but also in the 400 plus other games utilizing the Steam Workshop,” Valve programmer Tom Bui said in an interview with Polygon. “So it seemed a natural extension to enable creators to make cool new VR experiences that they could share with others.”

The new program takes advantage of the Steam Workshop to share content with other users, allowing developers to both show off their creations and also learn from those added by other users.

Developers can create any type of world they want, but the Destinations Workshop Tools are also able to use photogrammetry to create scenes, which allows users to stitch together real world photos and create a virtual location from them. Valve released two example worlds created with the new software, one of which was a scene on Mars that was created using images taken by NASA’s curiosity rover.

“The Destinations Workshop Tools are the same Source 2 tools we use internally at Valve and that the Dota 2 community uses to create custom games,” Bui said. “Creating a basic destination is pretty simple, but it can be a bit more involved to build a photogrammetry scene.

“We’ll have some tutorials to help people get started and that goes over some of the best practices we’ve discovered while building our own content. Actually publishing the destination to the Steam Workshop when a content creator is ready is only a few button clicks.”

If you are interesting in trying the new program out, you can download it for free on Steam.

Image courtesy of Valve Corp