World Machine

(*This post was meant to be posted last week but due to a network failure I had to save it offline and post as soon as I could.)

Hey guys!
Today my post will be about World Machine and how useful it is to making heightmaps look heaps more realistic.

World Machine can basically either make from scratch an entire planets coverage of maps and be completely randomised, manipulated and precisely programmed to change at the instant click of a button. another great thing that I use it for is to add natural landscape features to my height maps such as erosion and terraces, sandy banks, embankment erosion made by water and natural landscape happenings that occur in real life to effect and completely change the way peoples minds think in the way the see and absorb the landscape,

after spending many hours sculpting and defining your AAA map in Mudbox to the point that you feel that it looks completely real, you've basically just brain washed yourself to think so. others may say that it looks fantastic but they will know in the back of their heads that there is something missing but they will not know what?
That is where World Machine comes in handy, it dose not alter the entire height map to make it feel like its not yours anymore but it adds a few new layers and perspectives to it some of which you may not like and what to get rid of and that is why you need to bring it back and forth between Mudbox and World Machine to smooth out that erosion where you wanted to place a castle or lower some ground to make the hills look less steep so that trees can comfortably grow on them.

but all in all World Machine is a great tool and once you know how to use it, it can be very helpful in creating a rich and inviting map for your games some people may think it is cheating  but it isn't, it is just another tool in the ever expanding arsenal of the 3d game artist.

World Machine also helps create black and white masks so that you can easily and effectively texture your height map with ease. and those same masks can be used in UDK to be used as detail maps and is highly recommended that you use detail maps as well you may have noticed in some games the ground in open environments can look a little grainy and this detail map feature can quite effectively stop that if adjusted right and great tiles are used to cover your giant stretched texture map.


Hope you enjoyed the read for help learning to use world machine please sift through my older posts and what the tutorials I have posted and you will be shown all that is needed to get started it also shows you how to create Height maps to be used in World Machine using Mudbox and how to extract the black and white masks for use as detail maps and texture masks.

Yours sincerely
Josh.

PS, World Machine can be found at this URL "World Machine" it is a free download and i recommend that you purchase it if you wish to use bigger photo sizes then a 512 square.