Advanced World Machine tutorial or course?

Hello guys, do you know of any courses and in-depth multi-hour tutorials on advanced usage of World Machine?

I found a couple courses at Udemy but I found them very introductory. I was hoping for something more advanced, preferably focused on realistic terrain generation (realistic mountain chains, creative pipeline using Unreal Engine etc) for games/film.

I don’t mind either paid or free.

I am planning on making those, but sadly don’t have a lot of time. What topics would you be interested in?

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In the larger scale: realistic mountain chains (think Andes), valleys and terraces (Pamukkale), for example.

Also, smaller scale features such as rolling hills, river beds, features in a more “human” scale (World Machine defaults to large scale features like big mountains and I find it hard to do smaller features in it).

I’d be interested in pretty much everything related to the filters, combiners and selectors devices. Selectors could be a huge thing to expand and make interesting examples of.

Also a big focus on bitmaps for processing in external software like Unreal Engine. Especially for things like the vegetation and erosion devices (for example, to be able to generate procedural vegetation in Unreal by using World Machine exported bitmaps as a base to draw on, or texturing mountain sides using the talus output).

I’m not too interested in texturing for visualization inside World Machine, but exporting bitmaps that are usable in external tools is quite elusive when you have a complex terrain and not much understanding of how to select things properly.

Examples of game terrain that I find interesting: Horizon Zero Dawn and the Just Cause games (3 and 4).

The larger scale subject you mentioned were indeed topics I was planning to cover. The smaller scale stuff like river beds is harder to do, but rolling hills sounds like it fits well in WMs toolbox.

Regarding the UE-workflow specific tutorials, I’m sadly not familiar with UE so I don’t think I will be able to create good tutorials on that topic.

What do you mean with the following?

How they work and stuff? Because I already got a lot of the filters and combiners covered on my channel. Up next are the natural devices and selectors. If my content is not what you’re looking for, what is it you want? Maybe I can do more in depth or “using device x in the wild” kind of tutorials.

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I don’t know your content. Will check your Youtube channel.

YEAH! Especially selectors and filters.

I’d suggest creating a moderately complex terrain, then using selectors in order to generate bitmaps for specific features: for example, a bitmap for the snow line, talus/scree, soil, alluvial deposits, etc.

Some best practices guide would be good as well. I usually end up creating some really good looking terrain in the World Machine preview, but my node setup often ends up very complex and I have a lot of trouble generating usable bitmaps… so the terrain is beautiful but it’s basically useless for texturing in external applications :smiley:

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Okay, great to hear! Will take this in consideration once I’m going to do some more in-depth tutorials. Don’t expect them anytime soon, as I don’t have a lot of time.

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