World Machine v2.2
World Machine v2.2
World Machine 2 is a complete terrain generation solution for artists, game developers, visual effects studios and other visualization professionals. World Machine Original grew to become a highly popular application for the creation of landscapes and realistic looking geological features. World Machine 2 builds upon its predecessor and introduces a great set of new tools to enhance the way you create and texture your terrain.
Artificial Terrain. Natural Appearance
Powerful Fractal Generators
The theory of fractals provides nearly unlimited level of detail to your terrains. However, fractal terrains often lack diversity and are difficult to control.
World Machine 2′s Advanced Perlin Noise allows you to create very unique terrain types and styles, ranging from realistic to incredibly stylized.
Graph Based Interface
The shape of your world depends upon the components used to create it. World Machine uses a network-based (graph) user interface; these have been growing in popularity for a number of years. By stringing together components, you can achieve endless combinations of effects.
Powerful Erosion Modelling
The natural world is not shaped merely by mathematics. Wind, water, and other chaotic processes are responsible for much of the appearance of our world. World Machine offers industry-leading erosion tools to help create natural appearing terrains.
Powerful precipitation and river erosion models allow you to simulate millions of years of erosion…without having you wait around too long.
Visual Design, Procedural Power
Bridge the gap between artistically hand-crafted and fully artificial terrains.
New to World Machine 2 is a layout view that allows you to use vector-based drawing tools to manipulate your terrain. Combine the power of infinitely detailed fractals with intutively drawn shapes to define your major terrain features.
Create Shapes to use as a base for further terrain synthesis.
Insert Roads and other shapes that can realistically carve and fill the surrounding terrain.
Draw Masks to control or limit effects to particular geographical regions.
Interchange vector shapes with illustration and 3D packages using industry-standard file formats (SVG, AI)
Texture your World
For the first time, World Machine can create not only the shape of your terrain, but the color of it. Create megatexture-style high resolution texture maps for your external renderer or simulation engine, or create and export influence maps for traditional tiled texture rendering.
To help deal with the complexity of crafting textures, World Machine 2 ships with a variety of pre-built macros that make assembling fantastic looking surface texture maps quite easy. In fact, most of the images you see here have had their texture maps created solely with one of these default macros!
RGB data is manipulated in full 32bit floating point accuracy, and can be exported to 8 and 16bit/channel formats.
One World. Many Views
The terrain you define in World Machine exists upon an endless plane; you can view or export as large or small a section as you prefer at any time. Your viewing options incude:
Realtime 3D Views
Every action you take is previewed immediately for the current rendering viewport in a fully 3D viewport
Explorer View
Highly dynamic, Explorer View is not limited to merely showing you the current rendering area. Instead, you can fly, drive, or walk through the entire boundless world you have defined.
Layout View
The complement to Explorer View, Layout View is an orthographic overhead view. Offering Google Maps-style navigation and an astounding zoom ratio greater than 10,000:1, Layout View allows you to design, plan, and inspect your world in full detail.
World Machine 2.2 is an evolutionary successor to WM 2, designed to improve the user experience and fix all known issues. Despite being “only” a minor release, WM 2.2 brings many new features to the table!
Workview Improvements
You can now use routing points to organize your device networks, allowing you to reduce connection clutter and organize devices more logically. In addition, a variety of other improvements have also been made to the work view and other aspects of the program to allow for smoother workflow.
Bug Fixes
World Machine 2.2 will be the most stable and tested version to date. Dozens of bugs large and small have been fixed since the previous version.
Memory Paging
With the new paging system, running out of memory should be a much rarer experience. World Machine now implements its own virtual memory system to manage world information, saving to and bringing from disk as required.
You can now generally build a much larger world than possible before.
Sessions
Session files allow you to save the current build status of the devices in your World Machine world file and restore it when you next open the TMD file. You can now work on a project, save your session, then restore it on another day and pick up where you left off without having to do a very lengthy rebuild. These session files will tend to be large, but are invaluable for projects involving large world sizes.
Better Render Extent Management
Render Extents can now have differing resolutions for easier management of close-up areas and RGB versus terrain builds.
Automation Improvements
Additional support has been included for scripting render settings such as resolution and world extents.
Threading Improvements
There are two major improvements to threading. Firstly, virtually all devices that are processor-intensive now have internal multithreading code. All of your cores can be put to work even when the world file does not lend itself to parallel processing.
In addition, you can now specify a limit on the number of independent build threads in progress at once. This reduces the memory consumption of tiled and multithreaded builds, while still making use of all of the multiprocessing power available.
Improved Devices
Several new or improved devices are included in this release, including:
Color Gradient device: You can now create a bitmap from an input terrain using any of the built-in colortables, or your choice of external color gradient image files
Mesh Output: You can now downsample terrains within the output device, allowing you to build both a high-resolution texture map and a low-resolution mesh in one build
Color Selector: Create a mask based upon matching a color or color attributes
Streamlined Installer
World Machine is now fully compatible with Windows 7 and Vista. The installer also includes the ability to do silent installs, automatic first-run registration, and has full compatibility with standard-level user accounts.
Continue reading »
