A City Terrain With Roads And Lots

[F1nch]

Hello! I have been playing around with World Machine for a few days now in order to create the basis of a terrain for a city environment I am working on. So far, I’ve made some progress, but creating my desired terrain has proved beyond what I can figure out.

My goal is to create a relatively flat terrain with a grid of roads. This I’ve figured out how to do, and have made a result I’m pretty happy with. My issue comes in when I try to create flat “lots” in the squares of the grid. Though I need these lots to be flat, I also want them to match the height of the surrounding terrain. The only way I’ve found to create anything flat is to use the “constant” heightmap. However, this then ignores the height of surrounding terrain.

I’ve made a quick mockup in blender of what I am attempting to achieve. Any help is greatly appreciated, and I believe that World Machine will work great for what I’m aiming for. I just need to find the right way to do it.

Here is the mockup:

[HYLK]

Something like this?

[F1nch]

Yes, that looks absolutely perfect! I’m having trouble recreating your result, though. I’m on version 4020, if that changes anything? This is the best I’m able to create right now, and it’s not wanting to build or produce a scene result.

[Delta_Research]

For instance scattering, the heightmap to be scattered must be in localspace. You should be able to make the radial grad localspace by right clicking it, going to override device resolution/space, and then setting to localspace.

[blattacker]

I took a bit of a different approach, attempting to make the “lots” perfectly flat, but still relative to the surrounding terrain. It takes a bit of finagling (and the graph is not super easy to read) so I’ll include the world file in case anyone wants to take it apart and possibly (probably) improve it!

Editing because I forgot to mention, I think Artist Point is required for this tmd, because I don’t think the Crystallize device existed before then (though I could be misremembering).

myApproach.tmd (61.1 KB)

[davidroberson]

This is something I’ve dealt with in other apps. My solution involved a mask and a floor component. Does WM have the capacity for Floor or Ceiling operations? I might put in a request for them if it’s feasible to add them.